Making Grades

1997 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-149 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lesley Farrell
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
Academic Ability ◽  
Discourse Structure ◽  
Culturally Specific ◽  
Entrance Examinations ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Arena ◽  
Academic Merit ◽  
The Way

THE focus of this paper is on the role that culture plays in shaping the way examiners arrive at assessments of candidates' relative academic ability in tertiary entrance examinations. In attempting to understand this process, I call on notions of ‘Discourse’, especially of the kind developed by Gee (1991, 1992, 1994). When examiners ‘make grades’, they call on culturally specific understandings of what counts as a ‘literate essay’, a ‘relevant’ argument, and an appropriate relationship between candidate and examiner. I start with a discussion of tertiary entrance examinations, move to a discussion of Discourse and conclude with an analysis of one set of examiners' reports. Examiners use underlying discourse structure as the basis on which they make their judgements about academic merit, and that these judgements are culturally situated and do, therefore, realise cultural values. However, although they are clearly culturally situated, they gain their legitimacy in the public arena by an appeal to the universality of standards of academic merit.

scholarly journals ‘Very Inflated Rhetoric, Polysyllables and So On’: The Public Intellectual and Jargon in the Academy

2015 ◽  
Vol 156 (1) ◽  
pp. 98-107
Author(s):  
Cassandra Atherton
Keyword(s):  
Print Media ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Public Intellectuals ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Arena ◽  
Noam Chomsky ◽  
Online Presence ◽  
Large Sector ◽  
Computer Literate ◽  
The Way

The public intellectual, by their very definition, aims to reach a large sector of the public or publics. This requires proficiency, or at least the capacity to communicate in a variety of forms. As a large proportion of the public, to which the public intellectual appeals, is an online or cyber public, the importance of blogs in a computer-literate public cannot be under-estimated. The immediacy of the blog and the way in which an online presence facilitates immediate communication between the public and the public intellectual through the posting of comments online allow for a broad recognition of the intellectual in the public arena. My arguments will hinge on my interviews with contemporary American public intellectuals (Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Todd Gitlin, Camille Paglia and Stephen Greenblatt) and their views on communication in a society experiencing a decline in the publication of print media.

Yance Ford on Strong Island

2019 ◽  
pp. 295-306
Author(s):  
Scott MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
College Student ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Arena ◽  
Gas Station ◽  
The Way

After Yance Ford’s brother William was murdered in 1992, when Yance Ford was a college student, she imagined making a film about his death. Finally, in 2017, having worked for many years with television’s POV, seeing independent documentaries into the public arena (and having transitioned to male), Ford completed Strong Island, a feature-length, personal documentary that investigates William’s death within a context of the former and subsequent lives of his parents and siblings. As a crime story, Strong Island is both suspenseful and beautiful to look at. And it is personally performative for Ford. The unusually intimate close-ups of his face, his dramatization of William’s falling to his death in front of the gas station where he was murdered, and his conversations with family and friends dramatize the way in which this family tragedy and cultural injustice continues to inform the lives of those who knew William.

scholarly journals FORMS OF SOCIAL REACTION AGAINST CRIMINALITY

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-112
Author(s):  
Alina Zaharia
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Private Space ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Reaction ◽  
The Way

In the first part we define some forms of social reaction against crime conceived as a mechanism of social and normative organization, perpetuating itself differently from one society to another, depending on the specifics of each one, referring to the system of ethical, normative and cultural values. Next, we identify aspects related to fight against criminality, which consider the way of establishing some forms of social control, from a social/ legislative/ institutional/ state/ contextual norms perspective, that are found in the public or private space.

Late-Stalinist ideological campaigns and the rupture of jazz: ‘jazz-talk’ in the Soviet Estonian cultural newspaperSirp ja Vasar

Popular Music ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 509-529
Author(s):  
Heli Reimann
Keyword(s):  
Public Discourse ◽  
The Other ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Musical Form ◽  
Jazz Orchestra ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Arena ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Way

AbstractThis paper on Soviet Estonian jazz explores the dynamics of the processes which temporarily extinguished jazz from the public arena during late-Stalinism. This microhistory inflected study draws on the conception of ‘rupture’ through a close reading of the way jazz was constructed in the official narratives of the Estonian cultural newspaperSirp ja Vasar.Jazz in Estonia experienced no rupture during the first postwar years, but then the three successive Stalinist campaigns, each with gradually decreasing tolerance towards jazz, led finally to the temporary public disappearance of the music in 1950. The strategies enforced in the late 1940s, such as anti-jazz orchestra reform, dance reforms that banned the foxtrot and the other modern dances, and the eradication of the word jazz from public discourse, all served to silence the ‘formalistic’ musical form by framing it with negative connotations and by shaping the taste of the masses according to Soviet ideological paradigms.

Psychology and the "public arena."

1982 ◽  
Vol 37 (12) ◽  
pp. 1403-1404
Author(s):  
Richard Reardon
Keyword(s):  
The Public ◽  
Public Arena

Heritage

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Omar Shaikh ◽  
Stefano Bonino
Keyword(s):  
Facial Expressions ◽  
South Asian ◽  
Online Video ◽  
The South ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Public ◽  
Video Footage ◽  
Community Heritage ◽  
Personal Accounts ◽  
The Way

The Colourful Heritage Project (CHP) is the first community heritage focused charitable initiative in Scotland aiming to preserve and to celebrate the contributions of early South Asian and Muslim migrants to Scotland. It has successfully collated a considerable number of oral stories to create an online video archive, providing first-hand accounts of the personal journeys and emotions of the arrival of the earliest generation of these migrants in Scotland and highlighting the inspiring lessons that can be learnt from them. The CHP’s aims are first to capture these stories, second to celebrate the community’s achievements, and third to inspire present and future South Asian, Muslim and Scottish generations. It is a community-led charitable project that has been actively documenting a collection of inspirational stories and personal accounts, uniquely told by the protagonists themselves, describing at first hand their stories and adventures. These range all the way from the time of partition itself to resettling in Pakistan, and then to their final accounts of arriving in Scotland. The video footage enables the public to see their facial expressions, feel their emotions and hear their voices, creating poignant memories of these great men and women, and helping to gain a better understanding of the South Asian and Muslim community’s earliest days in Scotland.

The End of History Museums: What's Plan B??

2008 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 9-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cary Carson
Keyword(s):  
Historic Sites ◽  
The Public ◽  
End Of History ◽  
House Museums ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Museums ◽  
Plan B ◽  
The End Of History ◽  
The Way

Abstract Are historic sites and house museums destined to go the way of Oldsmobiles and floppy disks?? Visitation has trended downwards for thirty years. Theories abound, but no one really knows why. To launch a discussion of the problem in the pages of The Public Historian, Cary Carson cautions against the pessimistic view that the past is simply passéé. Instead he offers a ““Plan B”” that takes account of the new way that learners today organize information to make history meaningful.

Rewritten or Reused? Originality, Intertextuality, and Reuse in the Writings of a Buddhist Visionary in Contemporary Tibet

2017 ◽  
Vol 33 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 203-231
Author(s):  
Antonio Terrone
Keyword(s):  
Public Domain ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Way

The study of Buddhist texts can inform us of the way scriptures were composed, as well as illuminate the reasons behind their production. This study examines the phenomenon of borrowing and reusing portions of texts without attributing them to their ‘legitimate authors’ within the Buddhist world of contemporary Tibet. It shows that not only is such a practice not at all infrequent and is often socially accepted, but that it is used in this case as a platform to advance specific claims and promote an explicit agenda. Therefore, rather than considering these as instances of plagiarism, this essay looks at the practice of copying and borrowing as an exercise in intertextuality, intended as the faithful retransmission of ancient truths, and as an indication of the public domain of texts in Tibet.

Biblical Literacy and the English King James Liberal Bible

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-211
Author(s):  
James Crossley
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Biblical Literacy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Arena ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Liberal Capitalism ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Popular Nationalism ◽  
King James Bible

Using the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible as a test case, this article illustrates some of the important ways in which the Bible is understood and consumed and how it has continued to survive in an age of neoliberalism and postmodernity. It is clear that instant recognition of the Bible-as-artefact, multiple repackaging and pithy biblical phrases, combined with a popular nationalism, provide distinctive strands of this understanding and survival. It is also clear that the KJV is seen as a key part of a proud English cultural heritage and tied in with traditions of democracy and tolerance, despite having next to nothing to do with either. Anything potentially problematic for Western liberal discourse (e.g. calling outsiders “dogs,” smashing babies heads against rocks, Hades-fire for the rich, killing heretics, using the Bible to convert and colonize, etc.) is effectively removed, or even encouraged to be removed, from such discussions of the KJV and the Bible in the public arena. In other words, this is a decaffeinated Bible that has been colonized by, and has adapted to, Western liberal capitalism.

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