Social education through the lens of Bakhtinian theory

A review of Bakhtin in the Fullness of Time: Bakhtinian Theory and the Process of Social Education, Edited by Craig Brandist, Michael E. Gardiner, E. Jayne White and Carl Mika. L.: Routledge. 2020. 160 p. The review of the collection of articles Bakhtin in the Fullness of Time: Bakhtinian Theory and the Process of Social Education represents an analysis of the perspectives, main trends, and interpretations of key points, ideas, and concepts of M. M. Bakhtin in the contemporary theory and practice of Social Education. The book’s nine chapters are grouped within three problem areas, researched by the book’s contributors. This is, in the first place, a re-establishment of those philosophical and sociological sources that trace back to the roots of Bakhtin’s early views that had defined the nature of his responses to the challenges of his time in his early philosophical texts, books about Dostoevsky and books about bildungsroman. Another field of examination is Bakhtin's late dialogue with his contemporaries. Sometimes this dialogue is active and obvious, as it happens in the situation with the latest aesthetic and literary trends in Russia at the beginning of the 1920s. Sometimes this dialogue turns out to be ambiguous, therefore researchers can only guess how to reconstruct it, basing their views on the complementarity of Bakhtin’s ideas and Lev Vygotsky or Paulo Freire’s ones. An equally important aspect of this collection is a number of articles devoted to how Bakhtin's theory is transformed into "classroom practice", whether it concerns the use of dialogue and its capabilities in interaction with foreigners, providing educational opportunities to the most economically vulnerable segments of South African society, or communication with preschoolers in kindergarten. The authors of the book managed to create a convincing picture of how Bakhtinian theory is becoming one of the most important elements of contemporary theory and practice of education. At the same time, not only Bakhtinian ideas, primarily the concepts of dialogue, polyphony, carnival, and chronotope, are important, but also that free polyphony, which puts into effect any creative practice.

Digital Consumer Health: Negotiating Multiple Voices in the Clinical Consultation

In this paper, we explore what may happen when people who are ostensibly “well” bring data from digital self-tracking technologies to medical consultations. On the basis of a fictional case narrative, we explore how multiple “voices”, in a Bakhtinian sense of the term, inscribed in the self-tracking devices are activated, negotiated, evaluated and re-imagined in the context of care. The digital metrics “speak” precision, objectivity and urgency in ways that challenge conventional, normative understandings of doctors’ professional role and the patient-doctor relationship.Our theorizing is firmly grounded in our professional experience and informed by recent research on self-tracking, Mol’s research on the ways in which technology has become integral to medical care, Bakhtinian theory and medical professionalism, and it contributes to current professional debates regarding medical overuse and its potential to harm patients. Further research is needed to illuminate the consequences of digital self-tracking technologies for patient-professional consultations in practice.

O FUNCIONÁRIO PÚBLICO E SUA IMAGEM SOCIAL

The objective of this research is to investigate the content of the statements involving the public official in the artistic, political and civil spheres, selected in the national Internet portals, and to discuss the existing relationship between valuation and ideology, and their materialization in these statements. The hypothesis is that they were ideologically constructed, contributing to strengthen the pejorative image of the public official. This research is based on the bibliographic study of Bakhtinian theory, and addresses the concepts of valuation, ideology and utterance. Its conclusion confirmed that the investigated statements were ideologically constructed, based on the value judgment of society, contributing to the strengthening of the pejorative image of the public official, through social interactions.

An “old fight”: A case study of enduring struggle in early childhood education

This is a case study of political struggles over early care and education in the USA using a combination of archival, interview, and observational data from a study conducted in the US state of Arizona. This case analysis illustrates how a combination of the episodic nature of public attention paid to early care and education in the USA, internal tensions within US early care and education between its educational and caring purposes, and competition over scarce resources has worked to undermine the development of universal early care and education in the USA. The study is framed by Dorothy Holland and Jean Lave’s ideas of enduring struggles and locally contested practice, and uses an analytic strategy informed by Bakhtinian theory to illustrate how understanding the cultural logics involved in locally contested practice can be of use to the practice of policy advocacy, specifically engaging adversaries with what Bakhtin called an “excess of seeing” - understanding beneath the surface. While focused on one state in one national context, this analysis may have transnational relevance by raising comparative questions about early care and education policies and policy practice in other localities.

A Redneck Head on a Nazi Body. Subversive Ludo-Narrative Strategies in Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus

This article argues that Wolfenstein: The New Colossus, a AAA First-Person Shooter, is not only politically themed, but presents in itself a critical engagement with the politics of its genre and its player base. Developed at the height of #Gamergate, the game is interpreted as a response to reactionary discourses about gender and ability in both mainstream games and the hardcore gamer community. The New Colossus replaces affirmation of masculine empowerment with intersectional ambiguities, foregrounding discourses of feminism and disability. To provoke its players without completely alienating them, the game employs strategies of carnivalesque aesthetics—especially ambivalence and grotesque excess. Analyzing the game in the light of Bakhtinian theory shows how The New Colossus reappropriates genre conventions pertaining to able-bodiedness and masculinity and how it “resolves” these issue by grafting the player character’s head on a vat-grown Nazi supersoldier-body. The breaches of genre conventions on the narrative level are supported by intentionally awkward and punishing mechanics, resulting in a ludo-narrative aesthetic of defamiliarization commensurate to a grotesque story about subversion and revolt. Echoing the ritualistic cycle of death and rebirth at the heart of carnivalesque aesthetics, The New Colossus is nothing short of an ideological re-invention of the genre.

Nuanced and Dissenting Voices

Chapter 4, “Nuanced and Dissenting Voices,” examines the nuances diverse parents brought to their understandings of childrearing and self-esteem. Framed within Bakhtinian theory, this chapter gives voice to African American parents, working-class parents, conservative Christian parents, and mothers, particularly women who had experienced low self-esteem. These parents endorsed self-esteem, but refracted the language of the self-esteem imaginary in ways that made sense, given their diverse values and ideological commitments, social positioning, and idiosyncratic experiences. This chapter also describes the perspectives of two groups from the larger study who challenged key elements of the dominant discourse: grandmothers of Centerville children who raised their children in an earlier era, and Taiwanese parents who grew up in a different cultural context but were temporarily residing and raising their children in Centerville. These two groups of dissenters underscore again the book’s theme that self-esteem is rooted in time and place.

Bakhtin, Intertextuality, and Adaptation

Much of the current thinking about adaptation owes its orientation to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of intertextuality. Chapter 4 traces Bakhtin’s most influential contributions to adaptation studies. Against the assumption that adaptation is the faithful translation of a core of meaning, a Bakhtinian theory argues instead that adaptation is a way of looking at texts through interdeterminations with other texts that all texts share to a greater or lesser degree, rather than a special kind of text that is uniquely interdetermined. Although all relationships between texts exist only in the minds of individual audiences, interpreting texts has the power to generate productive dialogues between readers and other readers, texts and other texts, which overcome the isolation of individual audiences.

On dialogic speech: Convergences and Divergences between Jakubinskij, Bakhtin and Voloshinov

This article aims to discuss Lev Jakubinsky’s ideas presented in his 1923 essay On Dialogic Speech (Brazilian translation 2015), and its convergences and divergences with the thought of Bakhtin and Voloshinov. Studies on dialogue do not come from a unique theoretical source, but they appear connected to questions of linguistic and cultural practices in Russia (ROMASHKO, 2000: 84). An important part of this research was dedicated to dialectology, that is, to the dialectic speech, conceived then as dialogic speech. However, according to Voloshinov (1992: 147), in 1929 there was only one study devoted to the dialogue in Russian linguistics, the essay On Dialogic Speech. Some researchers on Jakubinsky contend that this essay was a reference to Voloshinov and Bakhtin, or that it was the direct inspiration source to the former and, through it, to Bakhtinian theory. The investigation of linguistic ideas at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century allows us to conclude that Voloshinov and Bakhtin adopted themes, problems and notions from the burgeoning philosophy and social sciences, nevertheless transforming what was given into something new.

Bakhtin and native language teaching in Brazil: some perspectives

The purpose of this article is to examine the infl uence of Bakhtinian theory, in particular the concept of speech genre, in offi cial documents of the Ministry of Education inBrazilintended for teachers in the public and private networks. In order to understand this very important impact of Bakhtin and the Circle, several aspects of how the works that were the hallmark of government guidance were received will be revisited. The outcome will be supplemented by analyzing a chapter of a textbook in the native language for high school students that deals with the concept of genre in teaching the production of argumentative texts.