Literacy Learning and Economic Change

1999 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 373-395 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Brandt

In this article, Deborah Brandt discusses two cases from a larger study in which she documents the changing conditions of literacy learning as experienced by ordinary people in the twentieth century. Her discussion of the lives of two women, Martha Day and Barbara Hunt, is grounded in principles of oral history and life history research. She presents the analytic concept of a "sponsor" to identify any agent who supports or hampers opportunities for literacy learning in the lives of her subjects. Her discussion of sponsorship in the lives of these two women highlights the relationship between literacy learning and economic change. Though these women were born two generations apart, they both witnessed, albeit from different points in time, the steady decline of a farm-based economy and its transformation by the forces of industrialization and consolidation of land under corporate control. Brandt argues that the accounts of these two women can aid speculation about how economic changes impact the processes of literacy learning. She also discusses how the concept of sponsorship can be useful to teachers as a way of helping students to recognize who is interested in their literacy, and why.

Genealogy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 66
Author(s):  
Shamus Y. MacDonald

Drawing on a combination of oral history and archival research, this article reconstructs a historic view of death and dying in areas of the province settled by Scottish Gaels. It discusses beliefs and customs associated with death, giving special attention to traditional house wakes. Inspired by studies in culturally related communities in Ireland, Scotland, and Newfoundland, this study highlights insider perspectives of local customs and beliefs in order to develop a clearer understanding of the relationship previous generations had to death in Gaelic Nova Scotia. This study concludes by suggesting why some mortuary customs were abandoned during the second part of the twentieth century.


2020 ◽  
pp. 152-173
Author(s):  
Phillip Brown

This chapter redefines labor supply within the context of the new human capital. It seeks to recapture a wider understanding of education and human capabilities, given long-standing objections to treating individuals as passive consumers of knowledge. Labor supply is thus understood as a way of developing individual freedom and rebuilding social cohesion at a time of profound social and economic change. The chapter points out that the relationship between individuals, education, and employment in an era of twentieth-century industrialism is no longer appropriate in an age of machine intelligence. What it means to be educated, along with what it means to be employable, changes in different economic and spatial contexts and in relation to different models of employment.


Author(s):  
Peter Stein

Historical jurisprudence is the title usually given to a group of theories, which flourished mainly in the nineteenth century, that explain law as the product of predetermined patterns of change based on social and economic change. It is thus opposed both to theories that see law as essentially an expression of the will of those holding political power (positivist theories) and to those that see it as an expression of principles that are part of man’s nature and so applicable in any kind of society (natural law theories). The writers of the Scottish Enlightenment first connected the historical development of law with economic changes. In the nineteenth century, Savigny and Maine postulated grand evolutionary schemes, which purported to be applicable universally. They were, however, based on the development of ancient Roman law and could only with difficulty be applied to other systems. These schemes are now discredited, but in the twentieth century more modest studies have successfully related particular kinds of law to particular sets of social circumstances.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Kaltham Al-Ghanim ◽  
Janet C E Watson

This paper examines the relationship between language and nature in southern and eastern Arabia. The work is the result of a two-year interdisciplinary network between the University of Leeds and Qatar University, with partners in the UK, Oman, Canada, the United States, and Russia. Our hypothesis is that local languages and ecosystems enjoy a symbiotic relationship, and that the demise of local ecosystems will adversely affect local languages. In this paper, we examine some of the language–nature effects in Qatar and Dhofar, southern Oman. Our regions differ in that Qatar has two seasons, summer and winter, and is predominantly arid, with occasional rain, while Dhofar together with al-Mahrah in eastern Yemen has four distinct seasons, receiving the monsoon rains between June and September, and, as a result, is home to hundreds of plants and animals found nowhere else in the world. Since the 1970s, in particular, both regions have experienced some of the most rapid socio-economic changes in the world. We ask what affect this socio-economic change has had on the language–nature relationship, and suggest that decoupling of the human–nature relationship as a result of socio-economic change is contributing in these regions to language attrition. We consider spatial terminology, traditional terminology for weather, the traditional measurement of time by narratives around key climatic events, and the role of stars in determining the weather and their role in folklore.


Author(s):  
Jarret Ruminski

In The Limits of Loyalty, Jarret Ruminski examines the lives of ordinary people in Confederate Mississippi to show how military occupation and the ravages of war tested the meaning of loyalty during the American Civil War. The extent of southern loyalty to the Confederate States of America has long been a subject of historical contention that has resulted in two conflicting conclusions: southern patriotism was either strong enough to carry the Confederacy to the brink of victory or so weak that the Confederacy was doomed to crumble from internal discord. Mississippi, the home state of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, should have been a hotbed of Confederate nationalism, but the reality was more complicated. This study breaks the “weak/strong” Confederate loyalty impasse by examining how people from different backgrounds–women and men, white and black, enslaved and free, rich and poor–negotiated the shifting contours of loyalty in a state where Union occupation turned everyday activities into a potential test of patriotism. While the Confederate government demanded total national loyalty from it citizenry, this book focuses on wartime activities like swearing the Union oath, illegally trading with the Union army, and deserting from the Confederate army to show how Mississippians acted on multiple loyalties to self, family, and nation, thereby thwarting the government’s attempt to enforce nationalism at any cost. Ruminski also explores the relationship between loyalty and slavery to demonstrate how an internal war between slaves and slaveholders defined Mississippi’s social development into the twentieth century.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (Special Issue) ◽  
pp. 21-30
Author(s):  
Fida Yasmin

The study examines the history of radio broadcasting in Kerala from the 1940s to the 21st century, focusing on the contributions of Akashvani Kozhikode. An attempt is made to search the social and cultural history of Akashvani Kozhikode and find out the contemporary relevance of Kozhikode station. The study's primary aim is to delve into the life history of Khan Kavil, who was an anchor, drama writer, actor, drama director, and broadcasting artist. Khan Kavil, born in a small village named Kavumthara in Kerala, was a voice artist who worked in Akashvani Kozhikode from 1978 to 1997 and carved a niche with his dynamic voice in the realm of radio broadcasting in Kerala. The study is trying to identify his contributions to the Akashvani Kozhikode and society. His life and contributions are recollected through popular memories, and an attempt is made to write a local and oral history based on this data gathered through the conversations with the eminent personalities of Khan Kavil's time who admired him and his colleagues. Further, the paper attempts to trace out why radio broadcasting still has a significant impact on ordinary people despite the advent of new forms of media. Magazines, newspapers, brochures, and interviews are used as the primary sources of this study.


2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.


Author(s):  
Lital Levy

A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, “Homelandic,” is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a “language plague” that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in search of his Arabic heritage. This book brings together such startling visions to offer the first in-depth study of the relationship between Hebrew and Arabic in the literature and culture of Israel/Palestine. More than that, the book presents a captivating portrait of the literary imagination's power to transgress political boundaries and transform ideas about language and belonging. Blending history and literature, the book traces the interwoven life of Arabic and Hebrew in Israel/Palestine from the turn of the twentieth century to the present, exposing the two languages' intimate entanglements in contemporary works of prose, poetry, film, and visual art by both Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. In a context where intense political and social pressures work to identify Jews with Hebrew and Palestinians with Arabic, the book finds writers who have boldly crossed over this divide to create literature in the language of their “other,” as well as writers who bring the two languages into dialogue to rewrite them from within. Exploring such acts of poetic trespass, the book introduces new readings of canonical and lesser-known authors, including Emile Habiby, Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Anton Shammas, Saul Tchernichowsky, Samir Naqqash, Ronit Matalon, Salman Masalha, A. B. Yehoshua, and Almog Behar. By revealing uncommon visions of what it means to write in Arabic and Hebrew, the book will change the way we understand literature and culture in the shadow of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 44-66
Author(s):  
Christine Adams

The relationship of the French king and royal mistress, complementary but unequal, embodied the Gallic singularity; the royal mistress exercised a civilizing manner and the soft power of women on the king’s behalf. However, both her contemporaries and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians were uncomfortable with the mistress’s political power. Furthermore, paradoxical attitudes about French womanhood have led to analyses of her role that are often contradictory. Royal mistresses have simultaneously been celebrated for their civilizing effect in the realm of culture, chided for their frivolous expenditures on clothing and jewelry, and excoriated for their dangerous meddling in politics. Their increasing visibility in the political realm by the eighteenth century led many to blame Louis XV’s mistresses—along with Queen Marie-Antoinette, who exercised a similar influence over her husband, Louis XVI—for the degradation and eventual fall of the monarchy. This article reexamines the historiography of the royal mistress.


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