Our aim in this article is twofold. First, we challenge the essentialized notion of adolescents and young people as perpetually driven to resist the authority of adults. At the same time, we disrupt linguistic conceptions of adolescent discourse, along with the discourse of youth at risk, by analyzing a transcript of classroom discourse that reflects an exchange between a highly regarded and well liked preservice teacher and his students. This representative transcript highlights the preservice teacher's ability to query, without a (...) concomitant ability to listen, respond, and build a classroom dialogue with his students; what we call here a Socratic monologue. Second, we link the notions of dialogue and responsiveness to Bakhtin's concept of answerability, emphasizing the joint construction of classroom discourse as an ethically answerable relation between teacher and students. He is currently doing research on new Asian pedagogies. Her research interests include applying sociocultural and critical lenses to the study of identity construction, in particular, the social construction of “at risk” identities for young people. Her current research documents the experiences of students and teachers in alternative high school programs. She is co-editor of Re/constructing “the adolescent”: Sign, symbol and body forthcoming from Peter Lang, Educational imaginings: On the play of texts and contexts with Shaun Rawolle published by Australian Academic Press, and Crossing boundaries: Perspectives across paradigms in educational research, with Paula Jervis-Tracey, also published by Australian Academic Press. (shrink)

This selective and opinionated overview of English-language scholarship on the philosophical method(s) of Plato's Socrates discusses whether this Socrates has any expertise or method, how he examines others and why, and how he exhorts others to care about wisdom and the state of their soul.

This paper provides a critical social semiotic analysis of the UK Department of Work and Pensions ‘Employ ability’ initiative. Although this initiative can be read as an attempt to reduce the exclusion of people with disabilities from the workplace, it is argued that the ‘Employ ability’ initiative, should be read as part of a discursive strategy to legitimate neo-liberal welfare reforms, where policies relating to the employment and underemployment of people with disabilities remain fixed almost entirely on the supply side (...) rather than the demand side of labour. A number of semiotic resources are identified that attempt to make a neo-liberal ‘problematic’ appear to be a natural and common sense response to questions of welfare. Most notable is the use of an ‘empowerment’ discourse that seeks to legitimate a disciplinary welfare regime and attempts to fabricate an active citizenry so necessary to the demands of neo-liberalism. (shrink)

Intersemiotic translation (IT) was defined by Roman Jakobson (The Translation Studies Reader, Routledge, London, p. 114, 2000) as “transmutation of signs”—“an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.” Despite its theoretical relevance, and in spite of the frequency in which it is practiced, the phenomenon remains virtually unexplored in terms of conceptual modeling, especially from a semiotic perspective. Our approach is based on two premises: (i) IT is fundamentally a semiotic operation process (semiosis) and (ii) (...) IT is a deeply iconic-dependent process. We exemplify our approach by means of literature to dance IT and we explore some implications for the development of a general model of IT. (shrink)

One may distinguish between three broad conceptions of linguistic meaning. One conception, which I will call “logical”, views meaning as given in reference (for words) and truth (for sentences). Another conception, the “monological” one, seeks meaning in the cognitive capacities of the single mind. A third, “dialogical”, conception attributes meaning to interaction between individuals and personal perspectives. In this chapter I directly contrast how well these three approaches deal with the evidence brought forth by fictive interaction. I examine instances of (...) fictive interaction and argue that intersubjectivity in these instances cannot be reduced to either referential-logical or individual-cognitive semantic notions. It follows that intersubjectivity must belong to the essence of linguistic meaning. (shrink)

This paper pursues two goals. The first concerns clarifying the relationship between Deleuze and the Russian linguist and culturologist, Mikhail Bakhtin. Not only does Deleuze refer to Bakhtin as a primary source for his emphasis on voice and indirect discourse, both thinkers valorise heterogeneity and creativity. I argue Deleuze's notions of ‘deterritorialisation’ and ‘reterritorialisation’ parallel Bakhtin's idea of ‘heteroglossia’ and ‘monoglossia’. Clarifying the relationship between Deleuze and Bakhtin leads directly to the second of my two other goals. I will argue (...) that an important difference in their characterisation of voice reveals a strong point in Deleuze's philosophy, one related to the political sphere. At the same time, however, Deleuze's particular way of articulating this point conceals a weakness, one related to the idea of the subject. I will conclude my paper by suggesting a way to address this weakness. (shrink)

With the internationalisation of the Chinese market, Confucian ethics began to draw researchers' attention. However, little research has been conducted in the specific application of Confucian ethics in marketing communication. This article fills in the research gap by examining how Confucian ethics underpins the discourse of Chinese Expo invitations. Chinese sales managers' views are incorporated into the analysis as substantiation of findings. Confucian ethics embraces both qing (emotion) and li (reason) and relevant ethical values such as guanxi (connections), qing, and (...) mianzi (face) play an important role for advertising Expos and trade fairs. The study also highlights the complexities of Chinese Expo advertising that is embedded in inviting behaviour. These findings shed light on understanding Confucian ethics in marketing communications in general and have implications for ethical international marketing and advertising practices. (shrink)

In his 1934 book Art as Experience John Dewey explores the relationship between human experience and art. His theory builds on the conception of experience inspired by Darwinian biology as the dyna...

This study presents an exploration of the belief changes of prospective teachers through social co-constructivist teaching. The future presumed in-class teaching orientations of the PTs were also estimated by metaphor analysis. A case study was conducted to monitor the belief changes of the PTs and estimate their probable in-class practices. The participants were six PTs involved in a certification in education programme. The data were gathered from the following different sources; interviews, written reflections and metaphor explanations. The data that were (...) analysed interpretatively and specific parts of the analysed data were subjected to quantification. The PTs held considerably conventional and idealistic teaching beliefs prior to the implementations. The PTs improved their reasoning and enlarged their conceptualisations regarding teaching and learning after the implementations. Five types of teaching belief typologies displaying inherently sophisticated nature of the beliefs were extracted. Some of the PTs appeared to have promise in terms of implementing more learner-centred teaching; however, others preserved their traditional teaching practical orientations. It was considered that changes in teaching beliefs may have motivational and attitudinal dimensions. Finally, capturing the metaphors of the PTs regarding teaching and learning appeared to provide more realistic insights into the estimated in-class practical orientations. (shrink)

Institutional talk, including service encounter discourse, has typically been taken to be ‘asymmetrical’ and the participants of these encounters to be constrained in terms of their allowable conversational contributions. This article explores shifts of alignment from normative serverclient alignments into different directions, involving symmetrical positionings of various kinds in travel agency spoken discourse. It is shown how these shifts occur and at which points in the interaction they might be found. The relevance of the commercial institutional context is also considered. (...) It is argued that these shifts from the supposedly unmarked asymmetrical alignment are motivated by orientations to relational goals and politeness/facework concerns, and they function as interpersonal devices achieving various relational configurations. These shifts are then related to levels of sociality that can be found in these, and other, face-to-face interactions. (shrink)

Using therapeutic conversations from a televised talk show as the source data, this article investigates how people solve emotional problems in an institutional setting within a specific social cultural context. In light of the genre framework and the Systemic Functional Linguistics, the investigation considers the TV talk show therapy under examination a distinct genre. The claim is based on the linguistic evidence drawn from the analytical work. As a valid genre the talk show therapy has been characterized with the communicative (...) intentionality to resolve emotional problems and to promote mental health to the public. These components in turn have shaped the generic structures, which become the crucial criteria that constitute a text as a genre. The article proposes that a broader conception of genre framework is an effective research method to describe the textual typologies and interpret the semantic structures of the social interaction in postmodern society. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 26 Heft: 4 Seiten: 709-716.

In response to the increasingly acknowledged power of metaphor upon everyday and scientific thinking, the present essay aims to revitalize the metaphoric process in commonsense psychology from the interaction view perspective. As prerequisites, a historical review of the "man-the-scientist" metaphor inherited in commonsense psychology, and a situation analysis of its dormant state are attempted. With metaphorical imagination, a holistic-paradigmatic view of personal theories is postulated on the basis of new knowledge in the philosophy and history of science, namely, the Duhem (...) - Quine (holism) thesis and Kuhn's paradigmatic perspective of scientific activities. To optimize the metaphoric process, deliberations are made on the similarities as well as the differences between the principal subject (i.e. everyday activities) and the subsidiary subject (i.e. scientific activities). It is shown that the "man-the-scientist" metaphoric process can be far-reaching and dialectic in nature, resulting in fresh perspectives for understanding both everyday and scientific activities. The focus of the present essay lies in elaborating a more sophisticated view on personal theories, and in calling for a non-reductionist approach to the investigation of commonsense psychology. (shrink)

This article explores two central notions of ‘dialectics’ and ‘dialogics’ based on the work of Vygotsky and Bakhtin respectively, as well their varying interanimations within Stalin-Marxist Russian societyIt is proposed that these two positions are incommensurably located alongside one another in contemporary education. I argue that Bakhtin offers diametrically oppositional educational provocations to those of Vygotsky.The implications of these interpretations will be explored with consideration of their underlying philosophical incompatibilities and contradictions, as well as the opportunities such a consideration pose (...) for educational practice today. (shrink)

Rabelaian carnivalesque provided philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin with a means of exploring the significance of humour through an examination of Middle Age peasant culture and the influence of the Renaissance on its legitimacy. This article argues that a similar phenomenon exists in modern educational settings and provides evidence to suggest that very young children are highly capable of working within this genre as a strategic orientation. It is proposed that the role of the early childhood teacher within this ‘underground culture’ is (...) to be a dialogic partner who recognizes their dual horizontal and vertical roles as both insider and outsider: appreciating humour with children but expecting (and celebrating) the child’s position within a distinct culture that necessarily resides outside officialdom. In doing so, the article concludes that teachers will gain deeper appreciation of the important role of humour as a means of positioning the self within institutions characterized by power dynamics that are typically beyond the young child’s control. Moreover, the teacher has greater opportunities to recognize the potential of humour as a form of social mobility and agency on the part of the child. (shrink)

This paper locates its genesis in a small town called Vitebsk in Belorussia which experienced a flowering of creativity and artistic energy that led to significant modernist experimentation in the years 1917–1921. Marc Chagall, returning from the October Revolution took up the position of art commissioner and developed an academy of art that became the laboratory for Russian modernism. Chagall’s Academy, Bakhtin’s Circle, and Malevich’s experiments, artistic group UNOVIS—all in fierce dialogue with one another—made the town of Vitebsk into an (...) artistic crucible in the early twentieth century. We argue that this creative collective transformed creative energies of Russian drama, music, theatre, art, and philosophy in a distinctive contribution to modernism, structuralism and formalism that contributed richly to the social understanding of creativity itself that is so evident across Mikhail Bakhtin’s subsequent body of work, and elsewhere across the world. This paper argues that a consideration of such interplay has much potential for twenty-first century educational philosophy. (shrink)

The work of the eye has a powerful influence across culture and philosophy—not least in Goethe's approach to understanding. Aligned to aesthetic appreciation, seeing has the potential to offer an authorial gift of ‘other-ness’ when brought to bear on evaluative relationships. Yet this penetrating gaze might also be seen as limiting when put to work in the services of ‘other’. From the subtle sideways glance, to the lingering gaze of lovers, a look can mean many things. But the eye does (...) not work alone—what can be seen is directly impacted by the ideologies that influence interpretation, the time and space of its origin, and the genre of its capture. But it is only later, through post-modern eyes, that the image finally falls victim to its subjective stance and can be thus rendered obsolete. As such, the work of the eye far exceeds literal notions of visuality. These same tensions are evident in the work of the early Bakhtin Circle through their engagement with neo-Kantism, Russian formalism, phenomenology and Russian Avant-Gardes. In this article the art of seeing is reconciled in educational practice for the early years as a relational event through Goethian-inspired interpretations of visual surplus and aesthetics. Through this lens seeing is brought to life as an encounter of authorship—implicating the ‘I’—as a potential relationship of meaning and accountability at the centre of visuality. (shrink)

The burgeoning activity of Australian backpacker tourists visiting the WWI Gallipoli battlefields is analyzed to explore the rite of international civil religious pilgrimage. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs, it is argued that this ritual form plays an important role in reimagining and enchanting established national mythologies. At Gallipoli, this occurred through the development of a dialogical historical narrative combining Australian and Turkish understandings of the past. The broader influence of this narrative on Australian historical understanding illustrates how global forces can be (...) integrated within the study of national collective memory. (shrink)

Buber’s distinction between the ‘I-It’ mode and the ‘I-Thou’ mode is seminal for dialogic education. While Buber introduces the idea of dialogic space, an idea which has proved useful for the analysis of dialogic education with technology, his account fails to engage adequately with the role of technology. This paper offers an introduction to the significance of the I-It/I-Thou duality of technology in relation with opening dialogic space. This is followed by a short schematic history of educational technology which reveals (...) the role technology plays, not only in opening dialogic space, but also in expanding dialogic space. The expansion of dialogic space is an expansion of what it means to be ‘us’ as dialogic engagement facilitates the incorporation, into our shared sense of identity, of aspects of reality that are initially experienced as alien or ‘other’. Augmenting Buber with an alternative understanding of dialogic space enables us to see how dialogue mediated by technology, as well as dialogue with monologised fragments of technology, can, through education, lead to an expansion of what it means to be human. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 207 Seiten: 279-301.

Dmitri Nikulin is one of the few contemporary philosophers to have devoted books to the topic of dialogue and the dialogical self, especially in the last fifteen years. Yet his work on dialogue and the dialogical has received scant attention by philosophers, and this neglect has hurt the ongoing development of contemporary philosophical work on dialogicality. I want to address this lacuna in contemporary philosophical scholarship on dialogicality and suggest that, although Nikulin’s account is no doubt insightful and thought-provoking, it (...) is problematic for two main reasons: first, his account fails to recognize the proper relationship between dialogue and agency; and second, his enumeration of the necessary and sufficient conditions for dialogue contains conceptual inconsistencies. (shrink)

Dmitri Nikulin is one of the few contemporary philosophers to have devoted books to the topic of dialogue and the dialogical self, especially in the last fifteen years. Yet his work on dialogue and the dialogical has received scant attention by philosophers, and this neglect has hurt the ongoing development of contemporary philosophical work on dialogicality. I want to address this lacuna in contemporary philosophical scholarship on dialogicality and suggest that, although Nikulin’s account is no doubt insightful and thought-provoking, it (...) is problematic for two main reasons: first, his account fails to recognize the proper relationship between dialogue and agency; and second, his enumeration of the necessary and sufficient conditions for dialogue contains conceptual inconsistencies. (shrink)

We offer a critical reading of televised weather reporting and forecasting discourse. We analyze text obtained from a US affiliate station of The Weather Channel over three days when a winter front advanced through the United States. Our critical analysis reveals the underlying ideological character of weather representation. We interpret the practice of weather representation within the context of the hegemonic discursive orders of leisure, consumption, capital accumulation, and risk management through the technologization of discourse. Through an analysis of the (...) interpretive practices of a small viewer community, we demonstrate that while alternative readings of weather discourse are possible, they are nevertheless shaped by the technologization of weather discourse. We conclude by promoting socio-semiotics and critical discourse analysis as promising theoretically-guided methodologies for analyzing discourse on the environment. (shrink)

The paper analyzes if it is possible to grow an I–Thou relation in the sense of Martin Buber with an artificial, conversational agent developed with Natural Language Processing techniques. The requirements for such an agent, the possible approaches for the implementation, and their limitations are discussed. The relation of the achievement of this goal with the Turing test is emphasized. Novel perspectives on the I–Thou and I–It relations are introduced according to the sociocultural paradigm and Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogism, polyphony inter-animation, (...) and carnavalesque. The polyphonic model, the associated analysis method, and the support tools are introduced. Some ideas on how the polyphonic model may be used for the implementation of a computer application able to analyze some features of the existence of an I–Thou relation are included. (shrink)

This paper aims at showing how the New Rhetoric’s insights allow for an integration of argumentation studies in linguistic investigation, and more specifically in discourse analysis. Claiming that argumentativity is a constitutive feature of discourse, it endeavors to explore logos as both reason and language by analyzing patterns of reasoning in their discursive actualization. In this approach, the attempt at influencing the audience’s representations is analyzed in the complexity of a discourse explored in its formal and socio-institutional dimensions.

As employers, higher education institutions in the UK are now under a statutory obligation to institute and implement equal opportunities policies. Integral to the process of instituting and implementing equal opportunities policies is effective communication of the policies. In this paper I conduct a critical discourse analysis of the staff equal opportunities policies of six UK higher education institutions as they were presented on their websites in October 2004. The aim of the analysis is to map out the policy documents' (...) genres and styles, the types of audiences addressed and anticipated, the representation of social identities, and the inter-textual meanings that are incorporated and presupposed. It is argued that the policy statements draw upon and intersect several genres which do not sit quite comfortably with each other and which create some ambiguities as to their communicative purpose, and that they are organized around performative enunciations of promises and commitments largely oriented towards the future. I will also explore the ways in which the policy statements relay and re-inflect the statutory obligations emanating from governmental legislation, and the tensions and contradictions following from the policy statements' attempts to reconcile the principle of equal opportunities with the ideological construct of meritocracy. And finally, considering the aggregate configuration of the six higher education institutions' policies, I highlight the differential topicalization of equal opportunities ‘areas’ in the policy documents. (shrink)

This paper aims to interrogate the potential and challenges in interdisciplinary working across disciplinary boundaries by examining a longitudinal partnership designed to research student experiences of digital technologies in undergraduate medicine established by the two authors. The paper is situated in current methodological trends including the changing value of replicability and evidence based methods and increases in qualitative and mixed methods studies in Medical Education, whilst education research has seen growing encouragement for randomised controlled trials and large-scale quantitative studies. A (...) critical analysis of the partnership interactions is framed by Holland’s positional and imagined identities, negotiated across ‘figured’ worlds and the concept of epistemic games that guide knowledge construction. We consider social, political and cultural challenges and how ‘in between’ sites of knowledge were established where the academic identity of each was shaped by engaging with the other and new theoretical, methodological and ethical understandings were co-constructed. The paper concludes that despite the on-going challenges, ‘bottom up’ partnerships can contribute to a growth in interdisciplinarity which might itself be understood as a boundary object. Interdisciplinarity necessitates improvisation and boundary crossing and can therefore always be considered a matter of negotiation, creativity and collaboration. (shrink)

This paper is an attempt to analyse the concept of literary autonomy, to explore its various manifestations in previous and current theories of literary studies and literary aesthetics, and to fit it into a broad outlook of literature's specificity and uniqueness. It defends the idea of literature's separate identity, however, not at the expense of breaking free of the concept of meaning in the strict sense, seeking special literary value in the independence of aesthetic value from other values, or in (...) the claim that literature has no purpose outside of itself, and then argues that such position need not be confounded with reductionism. (shrink)

This article offers a hybrid rhetorical-qualitative discourse analysis of the FDA’s 2011 Avastin Hearing, which considered the revocation of the breast cancer indication for the popular cancer drug Avastin. We explore the multiplicity of stakeholders, the questions that motivated deliberations, and the kinds of evidence presented during the hearing. Pairing our findings with contemporary scholarship in rhetorical stasis theory, Mol’s (2002) construct of multiple ontologies, and Callon, Lascoumes, and Barthe’s (2011) “hybrid forums,” we demonstrate that the FDA’s deliberative procedures elides (...) various sources of evidence and the potential multiplicity of definitions for “clinical benefit.” Our findings suggest that while the FDA invited multiple stakeholders to offer testimony, there are ways that the FDA might have more meaningfully incorporated public voices in the deliberative process. We conclude with suggestions for how a true hybrid forum might be deployed. (shrink)

To be successful, collaboration at work requires its participants to have a common sense about what is happening and where things are heading. But how can collaborators have such a sense in common if what is going on continuously changes? This study investigates the joint communicative work participants in collaborative activity do to remain aligned on how things are going and where things are at for the purpose of maintaining a ground in common. Our test case for illustrating this joint (...) work is the fluid and constantly changing world of software development. Our study uses a transactional approach to show how software developers working together continuously make available what they are attuned to, which constitutes their common ground that allows actions and talk to make sense. The common ground enables a common, inherently shared sense of what is happening and how things are going. Rather than having “meaning” in themselves, signifiers (words, gestures, body movements, cursor movements) create and are part of the common ground against which they make sense. Signifiers are motivated by and produce an accented visible that is available to all group members; and this accented visible (including the signs) makes for the common ground. (shrink)

Theories of discursive genres provide the philosophical and theoretical framework for the empirical examination of the ways in which immigrant women construct their cultural identities in contexts of violence. The claim of the paper is that the analytical genres of confessional and testimonial discourse enable the examination of the particular ways by which immigrant women both reproduce and resist power and violence.

The aim of this article is to motivate and outline a dialogical perspective on agency that accommodates centrifugal and centripetal tendencies in current cultural theories of agency. To complement approaches that assume a high degree of integration and clarity, we emphasise the diversity of agency as it is experienced in the open-ended dialogical relationship with a particular other. While these former approaches to agency provide us with the means to examine the influence of social processes such as division of labour (...) and reproduction of community, they tend to underplay the importance of agency as it is embodied and experienced in the lives of particular people. To reflect on this aspect of agency, we will draw extensively on Bakhtin's work, which crosses boundaries between philosophy, psychology and literary criticism, and which is concerned to understand what is personal in activity. In terms of agency, his work draws our attention to the sense of responsibility and potentiality that imbues our dialogues with particular others, the aesthetics and ethics involved in dialoguing with the other, and the sense of dilemmatic choice and intonation that is involved in our dialogue with the other. (shrink)

Nuolat atsiranda vis naujų meninių kūrinių, jiems svarbu pritraukti savo auditoriją, adresatą. Todėl iš tos gausybės meninių kūrinių visuomenei reikia rinktis, kurie iš jų yra verti dėmesio, o kurie neatitinka keliamų reikalavimų. Meninių kūrinių recenzijos padeda susidaryti nuomonę ir apsispręsti, ar verta tuos kūrinius skaityti. Šiame straipsnyje pristatoma recenzija kaip žanras, apibrėžiamos ir pristatomos svarbiausios šio žanro ypatybės ir funkcijos. Recenzijos skaitytojai tikisi, kad recenzentas ne tik pristatys ir aprašys nagrinėjamą kūrinį, bet ir pateiks jo argumen­tuotą analizę ir vertinimą. Pastarasis (...) yra būtina bet kurios recenzijos dalis. Labiausiai ištirtos akademinės recenzijos, įvairių sričių knygų recenzijos, tačiau mažai domimasi meninių kūrinių recenzijomis. Iš pastarųjų daugiausia dėmesio sulaukia grožinių kūrinių recenzijos. Šiam tyrimui buvo surinktos angliškos ir lietuviškos filmų ir spek­taklių recenzijos, publikuotos 20 a. aštuntojo dešimtmečio pirmoje pusėje. Šiuo tyrimu siekta išskirti įvairius elementus, būdingus angliškų ir lietuviškų meninių kūrinių recenzijų struktūroms, rasti šių skirtingų kultūrų recenzijų rašymo tradicijų panašumus ir skirtumus. (shrink)

This article examines the discourse competence of high-functioning children with autistic spectrum disorders to participate in narrative introduction sequences with family members. The analysis illuminates the children’s own efforts to launch narratives, as well as their ability to build upon the contributions of others. Ethnographic, discourse analytic methodology is integrated with the theory of discourse organization and the weak central coherence account of autism. Introductions of both personal experience narratives as well as fictional narratives are examined. The children were especially (...) competent in the use of stable introductory practices when launching fictional narratives, pre-organized by the media of expression. Their challenge was not in the introduction, but in the narrative co-telling, which often was not globally organized over an extended course of propositions. The heterogeneity of the ASD children’s discourse competence and its implications for discourse analysis are discussed. (shrink)

The present article deals with reported speech as an element of argumentation in the newspaper discourse of Great Britain viewed in the unity of its syntactic and semantic characteristics and argumentative functions. Theoretically, the research is based on the dialogic understanding of quotations, the dialogue theory by Bakhtin and contemporary argumentation theory. The proposed integral approach to reported speech combining linguistics with logic and argumentation theory revealed the relations between purely linguistic characteristics of reported speech with its functioning in argumentative (...) discourse of contemporary British press. (shrink)

Qualitative research methods in sport often advocate that to understand others, obtain significant knowledge and do ethically admirable research we should empathise with our participants by imagining being them. In philosophy, it is likewise often assumed that we can overcome differences between people through moral imagination: putting ourselves in the place of others, we can share their points of view, merge with them, and enter into their embodied worlds. Drawing partly on the view that imagination is embodied and the philosophy (...) of Bakhtin and Levinas, along with research on people's experiences of becoming disabled through playing sport, this paper problematises the assumption that we can imagine ourselves differently situated or being another person. It argues that our imagination and ability to put ourselves in the place of others is constrained partly by embodied experience and otherness. Some reflections on what this might mean for disability and sport research are then offered. (shrink)

This article focuses on the construction of two types of non-logical paradoxes in news discourse: 1) inconsistencies of positions and acts; 2) conflicts between reality and expectations or common sense. I will argue that these paradoxes are constructed by various discursive devices and will demonstrate the key role played by conventional and conversational implicatures in this regard. The discussion will focus on 23 items covering disputes between ultra-Orthodox and secular Jews, broadcast on mainstream Israeli television news in 2009. I will (...) show that the journalists consistently attribute paradoxicality to Haredim, and that this corresponds with the common public bitterness towards them because they enjoy financial support from the government, while sharing little of the economic and security burden. Moreover, I will argue that the paradoxical representations of Haredim rely on the secular ‘we’ group view and serve to base its common sense and norms. (shrink)

When compared with the Pāli versions of the Nanda tale—the story of the ordainment and liberation of the Buddha’s half-brother—some of the peculiar features of Aśvaghoṣa’s telling in the Saundarananda come to the fore. These include the enticing love games that Nanda plays with his wife Sundarī before he follows Buddha out of the house, and the powerful, troubling scene in which Buddha forces Nanda to ordain. While the Pāli versions are aware of fantastic elements such as the flight to (...) the Himālayas, and while each adds its own unique emphases that re-shape the events, none raise such deep ambivalence as done by Aśvaghoṣa. The Comparison of the different tellings then raises a more general theoretical point in relation to Buddhist literature—that genre defines the special features of each adaptation of the story, rather than any historical conditions regarding transmission; the versions each conform to the specific intellectual context of the text that appropriates them. This understanding allows an advancement of the idea of genre in Buddhist canonical and semi-canonical texts. (shrink)

Currently, our official rationality is still of a Cartesian kind; we are still embedded in a mechanistic order that takes it that separate, countable entities (spatial forms), related logically to each other, are the only ‘things’ that matter to us—an order clearly suited to advances in robotics. Unfortunately, it is an order that renders invisible ‘relational things’, non-objective things that exist in time, in the transitions from one state of affairs to another, things that ‘point’ toward possibilities in the future, (...) which mean something to us. I have called such things, hermeneutical–dialogical ‘things’ as they gradually emerge in our back-and-forth, step-by-step relations to the others and otherneses in our surroundings; they consist in the ‘promissory’ things sustaining our trust in each other and in our authorities, in our social organizations and social institutions, and in our culture. Clearly, we need to understand better, not only what robots can, and cannot do, but also the long-term ethical and political implications of inserting robotic activities into our everyday ways of relating ourselves to our surroundings if we are to avoid the dystopian futures envisaged by some. Descartes’ aim of “making ourselves, as it were, masters and possessors of nature,” forgets our larger task of our making ourselves into human beings—of doing together in dialog what we cannot do apart. (shrink)