Upheaval and reinvention in celebrity interviews: Emotional reflexivity and the therapeutic self in late modernity

The disruptions of life in late modernity render self-identity fragile. Consequently, individuals must reflexively manage their emotions and periodically reinvent themselves to maintain a coherent narrative of the self. The rise of psychology as a discursive regime across the 20th century, and its intersections with a plethora of wellness industries, has furnished a new language of selfhood and greater public attention to emotions and personal narratives of suffering. Celebrities, who engage in public identity work to ensure their continued relatability, increasingly provide models for navigating emotional trials. In this article we explore representations of selfhood and identity work in celebrity interviews. We focus on media veterans Nigella Lawson and Ruby Wax, both of whom are skilled in re-storying the self after personal crises. We argue that interpretive capital as a peculiarly late modern resource confers emotional advantages and life chances on individuals as they navigate upheavals, uncertainties, and intimate dilemmas.

Opening or Impasse? Critical Media Literacy Pedagogy in a Posttruth Era

Critical media literacy (CML) education is an approach to teaching about power, ideology, and hegemony through media. As a critical intervention in mainstream media literacy education, CML education integrates a cultural studies lens with a critical pedagogy orientation. In this article, we use critical auto-ethnography and personal reflective narratives or “anti-biography” to explore the dynamics and tensions of teaching CML in the posttruth era. We locate the shift to posttruth in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and election of Donald Trump, which produced a resurgence in far-right discourses promoting distrust of media and state institutions. We show how this shift created openings to criticality that made teaching CML easier in some ways; however, as we look deeper, what appears as an opening may in fact be an impasse. Through personal narratives, we illustrate what these openings and impasses looked like, how they felt and how they played out, to theorize about the possibilities and tensions of teaching CML in the current political moment. We argue the posttruth era necessitates a change in how we teach CML but not, as commonly argued, by teaching students how to fact-check or identify reliable sources. Instead, we must learn and teach about how the right uses media in transgressive ways to promote and normalize a racist, sexist, and authoritarian political agenda. We must also work to better understand students’ experiences of economic precarity and the limits of neoliberal multiculturalism.

Identity Development of Foreign Language Teachers in Lithuania

Teacher identity is an evolving, multi-dimensional concept of a teacher’s understanding of self, best understood as a dynamic narrative of self-growth. The present study is focused on hypothesized stages of teacher identity development (Pride, Survival, Experimentation, Disenchantment, Rebellion and Progressive Proficiency) and their occurrence in Lithuanian foreign language teachers. A series of semi-structured interviews were carried out with eight Lithuanian foreign language teachers to discover their personal narratives of teacher identity development.The findings of the qualitative case study research revealed that key features of the six possible identity stages were present across the unique experiences of theforeign language teachers interviewed. However, each research participant displayed only certain key features of each identity development stage rather than a combination of all the possible features. In general, less experienced teachers displayed fewer key features at certain identity stages, implying that they had not experienced particular phases of identity development to completion. The results suggest certain features of identity development stages can be omitted and then experienced later in a teacher’s career. Teacher satisfaction with compensation, job security, professional prestige and the education system in general were additional factors that contributed uniquely to the identity development of teachers working in Lithuania.

Developing post-ableist music therapy: An autoethnography exploring the counterpoint of a therapist experiencing illness/disability

<p>This PhD examined a therapist’s experience of illness/disability to see if any new light could be shed on music therapy whilst also finding ways to navigate disability as a practitioner. There has not been adequate research attention given to the experiences of music therapists who have an illness/disability. The position is often negotiated in isolation with minimal tools and resources. An arts-based autoethnography was used to determine how the close examination of one’s personal experience with illness/disability can impact on practice, how the work can be negotiated, and to uncover any new practical or theoretical meanings. Furthermore, it looked to determine what arts-based autoethnography could offer one’s practice. A poststructural lens was used that drew on social constructionism, feminism, and the work of Michel Foucault. Data generated from a music therapist’s practice, experiences of illness/disability, literature, and professional documents were analysed using Foucault’s “critical ontology of ourselves” (Foucault, 1984b, p. 47). Hidden processes of problematic ableism were found within the practice examined as well as in some educational and professional encounters. These regimes of ableism were supported by universalising and dichotomising discourses, namely humanism, western normativity, limited observable understandings of disability, and the enforcement of able/disabled divide through many binaries. The methodology provided the tools to reposition the practice to politicise disability and address ableism. Addressing ableism was found to be more complex than simply incorporating disability issues into existing contemporary frameworks. The analysis led to the development of Post-Ableist Music Therapy (PAMT). PAMT extended the relational ethic beyond what was present in the prior practice by drawing on aspects of posthumanism, agonistic plurality, and increasing the visibility of disability studies and crip theory. Therefore, PAMT offers a different lens to the critical orientations’ apparatus: a social justice practice not based on empowerment and humanism but on agonism and posthumanism instead. As there is a lag in the theorisation of ableism, PAMT provides an alternative framework that can be applied to current approaches to increase our professional consciousness of ableism. By repositioning the practice and exploring alternative subjectivities, the professional and personal narratives of a therapist experiencing illness/disability became more integrated, working with–not against–each other in a shared activism. The methodology fostered an increased ethical care of the self; offered tools that critiqued what we are; experimented with going beyond the limits imposed on us. The use of such tools could have wider application in the everyday practices of therapists. The findings have significant implications for practice and training, as the challenges people and societies face cannot be adequately dealt with without tools to explicitly uncover and address normalisation and ableism.</p>

Developing post-ableist music therapy: An autoethnography exploring the counterpoint of a therapist experiencing illness/disability

<p>This PhD examined a therapist’s experience of illness/disability to see if any new light could be shed on music therapy whilst also finding ways to navigate disability as a practitioner. There has not been adequate research attention given to the experiences of music therapists who have an illness/disability. The position is often negotiated in isolation with minimal tools and resources. An arts-based autoethnography was used to determine how the close examination of one’s personal experience with illness/disability can impact on practice, how the work can be negotiated, and to uncover any new practical or theoretical meanings. Furthermore, it looked to determine what arts-based autoethnography could offer one’s practice. A poststructural lens was used that drew on social constructionism, feminism, and the work of Michel Foucault. Data generated from a music therapist’s practice, experiences of illness/disability, literature, and professional documents were analysed using Foucault’s “critical ontology of ourselves” (Foucault, 1984b, p. 47). Hidden processes of problematic ableism were found within the practice examined as well as in some educational and professional encounters. These regimes of ableism were supported by universalising and dichotomising discourses, namely humanism, western normativity, limited observable understandings of disability, and the enforcement of able/disabled divide through many binaries. The methodology provided the tools to reposition the practice to politicise disability and address ableism. Addressing ableism was found to be more complex than simply incorporating disability issues into existing contemporary frameworks. The analysis led to the development of Post-Ableist Music Therapy (PAMT). PAMT extended the relational ethic beyond what was present in the prior practice by drawing on aspects of posthumanism, agonistic plurality, and increasing the visibility of disability studies and crip theory. Therefore, PAMT offers a different lens to the critical orientations’ apparatus: a social justice practice not based on empowerment and humanism but on agonism and posthumanism instead. As there is a lag in the theorisation of ableism, PAMT provides an alternative framework that can be applied to current approaches to increase our professional consciousness of ableism. By repositioning the practice and exploring alternative subjectivities, the professional and personal narratives of a therapist experiencing illness/disability became more integrated, working with–not against–each other in a shared activism. The methodology fostered an increased ethical care of the self; offered tools that critiqued what we are; experimented with going beyond the limits imposed on us. The use of such tools could have wider application in the everyday practices of therapists. The findings have significant implications for practice and training, as the challenges people and societies face cannot be adequately dealt with without tools to explicitly uncover and address normalisation and ableism.</p>

Lexical and Grammatical Errors in Developmentally Language Disordered and Typically Developed Children: The Impact of Age and Discourse Genre

Persistent lexical and grammatical errors in children’s speech are usually recognized as the main evidence of language delay or language disorder. These errors are usually treated as a sign of a deficit in language competence. On the other hand, some studies have revealed the same kinds of grammatical errors in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and in typically developed (TD) children. Quite often, DLD children use grammatical markers properly, but sometimes they do this erroneously. It has been suggested that the main area of the limitations in DLD children is language performance but not language competence. From the perspective of the resource deficit model, the error rate in DLD children should be influenced by the cognitive demands of utterance and text production. We presume that different genres of discourse demand a different number of cognitive resources and, thus, should differently impact the error rate in children’s speech production. To test our hypothesis, we carried out an error analysis of two corpora of child discourse. The first corpus contained longitudinal data of discourse (personal narratives, fictional stories, chats, and discussions) collected from 12 children at four age points (4 years 3 months., 4 years 8 months., 5 years 3 months., and 5 years 9 months. years). Another corpus contained discourse texts (fictional stories and discussions) collected in the framework of a cross-sectional study from 6-year-old TD and DLD children; the DLD children had language expression but not comprehension difficulties. A comparative analysis between different discourse genres evidenced that the genre of discourse and age of assessment impacted the error distribution in the DLD and TD children. Such variables as the lexical and morphological error rates were impacted the most significantly. The results of the two studies confirmed our hypothesis regarding the probabilistic nature of lexical and grammatical errors in both DLD and TD children and the relationship between a cognitive loading of the genre and the error rate.

CMALT 2011 and 2021: Personal narratives for professional recognition

Professional recognition through Certified Membership of the Association for Learning Technology (CMALT) provides a significant opportunity for all those who use learning technologies to be acknowledged for their experience, capabilities, and practice. The CMALT portfolio requires a personal narrative that presents description, critical reflection, and evidence of professional practice. Through an experiential lens, this paper considers three facets of the authors’ CMALT experiences a decade apart—how the portfolios as personal narratives encouraged reflection on practice; the commonalities in the technology themes presented in those portfolios; and how reflective coaching contributed to the benefits of applying for CMALT.

Liquid Narrative of European Cultural Identity in the Time of Uncertainty (2008–2020)

As Leonidas Donskis (2016: 9) once wrote, “Europe has been saved many times by its narrative powers”. In this time of uncertainty and disasters, our public narratives are filled with gossips, conspiracies, intolerance, and hate speech that strengthen divisions in society. During pandemic lockdowns, when physical closeness is exchanged with social interactions online and when global identities and culture are uploaded on digital platforms, we ask: what does it mean to be European in a time of uncertainty and what binds our collective identities and helps us to overcome our fears and anxieties? Considering the past and present (2008–2020) global and European economic, political, healthcare, and cultural as well as personal crises, this auto-ethnographic essay raises these questions: How can personal narratives help to strengthen European cultural identity in these times of uncertainty? Do personal narratives weaken collective identities? By using an auto-ethnographic approach, this paper is an attempt to determine whether a holistic research approach can be used in the analysis of “liquid” European cultural identity and personal narratives. Therefore, this paper is not just for finding the right answers or right stories but is meant to act rather as a stepping stone for further discussion on how to communicate European cultural identity and how to raise self-identification, cultural solidarity, and unity during these times of uncertainty.