The Pedagogy of Song

2021 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 124-133
Author(s):  
Daniel Stein Kokin

Drawing upon the author’s “Settlement in Israeli History” course, this essay argues that song can play a valuable and pedagogically economical role in Israel Studies and general humanities teaching, in both conveying meaning and initiating students in the art of close textual analysis. In particular, it showcases how the Israeli classics “Anu banu artzah” (We have come to the land), “The Ballad of Yoel Moshe Salomon,” and “Shir ha-‘emek” (Song of the Valley) can be deployed to stimulate vibrant and critical class discussions. In doing so, it also offers detailed readings of these songs and their place in Israeli culture.

Apeiron ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Woodcox

AbstractThis paper offers a novel interpretation of the nature and role of logical (logikôs) argumentation in Aristotle’s natural philosophy. In contrast to the standard domain interpretation, which makes logikôs argumentation the contrary of phusikôs, relying on principles drawn from outside the domain of natural science, I propose that the essential or defining feature of logikôs argumentation is the use of principles that are general relative to the question under investigation. My interpretation is developed and illustrated with a close textual analysis of Aristotle’s explanation of mule sterility in Generation of Animals II 8.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 113
Author(s):  
Samina Akhtar ◽  
Muhammad Rauf ◽  
Saima Ikram ◽  
Gulrukh Raees

This paper is an attempt to portray the plight of Mariam that she undergoes due to her illegitimate social status. The study focuses on the critical societal attitude towards the illegitimate unfortunate women. Mariam begins her life with a “harami” status; continues her struggle for personal identity, suffer and endures as a battered woman and leave this world as a woman of consequences by digging herself out of the lower social status that society attached to her. The study analyzes Mariam’s endurance, struggles and resistance in her strenuous journey to attain legitimate ending. The researcher used feminist literary criticism to interpret the text as a research methodology and adopted close textual analysis of the text by Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 17-30
Author(s):  
Poonam Singh

The paper attempts to project Bhim Rao Ambedkar as one of the foremost liberal feminists who advocated for Hindu women’s legal rights through the constitutional provisions listed in the Hindu Code Bill. He proposed four major stipulations, “one change is that, the widow, the daughter, the widow of predeceased-son. All are given the same rank as the son in the matter of inheritance. In addition to that, the daughter is also given a share in her father’s property: her share is prescribed as half of that of the son.”[1] To contemplate the predicament and marginalized position of Indian women, Ambedkar posited that caste and gender are intertwined. The imposition of endogamy was made compulsory by Brahaminical hierarchy which eulogized by Hindu religious scriptures to ensure sustained subjectivity of women, which eventually depreciated the egalitarian position of women. The focal point of the research paper remains a close textual analysis of Ambedkarite canon with archival study and genealogical examination contouring the discourse. The paper also encompasses potent reasons to establish the differences between the marginalization of upper-caste women and Dalit women. Difference between them is maintained by the ‘graded inequality.’ After having observed such differences, the paper intends to extend the idea that Ambedkar worked as a socio-political champion for Dalit women and Indian women concomitantly. To guarantee the freedom, equality, and individuality of Indian women, Ambedkar resorted to legalized mechanism and constitutional provisions. Key Words: Ambedkar, Hindu Code Bill, Manusmriti, Indian Women, Dalit Women, Indian Feminism, Caste, Patriarchy


Author(s):  
Karen Lury

This chapter illustrates how the BBC’s Children in Need telethon is informed and legitimated by different currency models as part of its aesthetic strategy. It demonstrates how these televisual currencies may be directly aligned with other kinds of medical currency models emerging within the economy of the UK’s National Health Service. Through close textual analysis of the programme and a related analysis of medical currency models proposed and piloted in relation to the NHS, it is argued that the ‘aestheticization’ of currency models provided by the programme reflects an ideological shift in the representation of medical care on public service television, in line with the ideology of neoliberalism and the incremental colonization of ‘financialization’ into all aspects of contemporary society.


Author(s):  
Bernard Boxill

Appalled by Kant’s views on race, some Kantians suggest that these views are unrelated to his central moral teaching that every human being “exists as an end in itself and not merely as a means to be arbitrarily used by this or that will.” But Kant developed his racial views because of his teleological view that we regard the history of the human species as the completion of a hidden plan of nature to establish an externally perfect state constitution as the necessary means to the end of developing all human predispositions. To evade the difficulty, Kantians may claim that Kant’s teleology and moral theory are not essentially related, but Kant thought that they were and close textual analysis supports their connection.


Author(s):  
D. Travers Scott ◽  
Meagan Bates

D. Travers Scott and Meagan Bates analyze television advertisements for anti-anxiety medications in order to explore the status of anxiety as a disability. Through close textual analysis, informed by Foucauldian theory and political economy, they demonstrate the intricate ways that femininity, disability, and normalization inflect and reinforce each other in contemporary discourses around mental health. These ads do not merely target women, they argue, but in fact construct femininity itself as inherently pathological and in need of medical intervention. At the same time, however, parodies of these ads reveal resistance to their pathologizing tropes and point the way toward greater appreciation for neurodiversity.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-41
Author(s):  
Zachary Vickers

Typical discourses around the puzzle film ‐ a genre that typically eschews classic storytelling for more complex narrative techniques, such as entangled secondary/tertiary plotlines, and characters with mental or psychological instability ‐ often privilege the manipulation of the film’s temporality and narratology. However, in this article, I perform a close textual analysis of the mise en scène of Inception by Christopher Nolan (2010) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) by Michel Gondry to demonstrate how these puzzle films privilege spatiality over time and plot to depict cognitive processes associated with mental and psychological instability, thereby bringing attention to an underrepresented attribute of the genre. I focus on the influence of surrealism on mise en scène, as surrealist art and cinema manipulate space to explore the psyche. I also draw on these films’ production history to show how the filmmakers, production crew and actors understood approaches to space as a cognitive process.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 4-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele White

Women use the #ManicureMonday Twitter hashtag to educate people about hand and nail care, share their nail art and expertise, and look at various hands. Beginning in 2013, the scientist Hope Jahren organized a hashtag hijacking in which scientists who were not in control of or associated with #ManicureMonday disrupted individuals' collaborative conversations about manicures, tried to educate participants, and expressed the scientists' values and interests. The scientists argued that what women's hands do is more important than how they look and that women and their manicured hands are constructed as passive objects on the Twitter feed. Jahren and these other scientists have identified Twitter as useful for their conversations about science and extended their own social capital by microblogging. They also use Twitter as a way to instruct women about objectification and other feminist issues and to intervene in women's interest in their nails, which these scientists believe is frivolous and disempowering. In this article, I address the diverse ways in which these ideas of usefulness, useful media, instruction, and social capital are articulated through #ManicureMonday by performing a close textual analysis of the manicure tweets and the hashtag hijacking. My reading is based on the relationship among feminist inquiries about viewing positions and objectification, the literature on useful media, and conceptions of social capital. I argue that we need to attend to the ways the #ManicureMonday hijacking and other instances of media education may not be useful for all participants.


2012 ◽  
Vol 82 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-424 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Vasquez Heilig ◽  
Keffrelyn Brown ◽  
Anthony Brown

In this article, Julian Vasquez Heilig, Keffrelyn Brown, and Anthony Brown offer findings from a close textual analysis of how the Texas social studies standards address race, racism, and communities of color. Using the lens of critical race theory, the authors uncover the sometimes subtle ways that the standards can appear to adequately address race while at the same time marginalizing it—the “illusion of inclusion.” Their study offers insight into the mechanisms of marginalization in standards and a model of how to closely analyze such standards, which, the authors argue, is increasingly important as the standards and accountability movements continue to grow in influence.


2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-88
Author(s):  
Terje Sparby

Background: The investigation of the specific connections between different techniques of meditation and their respective effects depends upon a classification of the meditative activity involved. Universal systems of classification need to be developed based both on traditional sources and contemporary science. In this article, a system of classification for anthroposophical meditation is proposed. Methods: The system was developed from a close textual analysis of meditation instructions given by Rudolf Steiner. The system of classification arising from the investigation was compared to three other classificatory systems that have recently been suggested. Results: The analysis resulted in a system of classification with two main branches: (1) the shared features of anthroposophical meditation and (2) the different aspects of specific anthroposophical meditations. The first branch contains the following sub-categories: understanding, internal conditions, external conditions, sequence, timeframe and dealing with hindrances. The second branch contains: source, aim, activity, sequence and timeframe. Other systems of classification tend to leave out the dimension of the meditative activity. Conclusion: The proposed classification system can be used as a starting point for further refinements of the classification of anthroposophic meditation, but it can also be used as a standard for future studies of the connections between different meditations and their effects.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document