Potential Effect of Informal Learning of English Through Watching a Medical Television Series on the Development of Maritime Medical English Competence

As a result of the widespread use of online technologies and vast opportunities for the use of English in everyday online life, the field of online informal learning of languages, in particular English, has attracted a new wave of research attention. Nevertheless, the number of corpus studies in this field remains low. More specifically, to date no research study has focused on the suitability of the language input to which online users are exposed while performing online activities with regard to the development of language skills in English as a language for specific purposes. In order to bridge this research gap, the objective of this paper is to apply the corpus approach to examine whether watching a medical television series may have an effect on the development of medical Maritime English for future deck officers. The results indicate that in terms of lexical density, lexical diversity, terminology, and word clusters, watching a medical television series may have a limited effect on the development of medical Maritime English for future deck officers. However, future research should examine whether watching television series may have an effect on the acquisition of typical speech patterns in spoken maritime communication, which are closely related to everyday spoken communication. Importantly, the results also seem to indicate that online informal learning of English cannot replace all segments of the formal learning of English for Specific Purposes, but can significantly contribute to the development of general English competence, which is a precondition for the further development of discipline-specific language competence.

ARIAS-BADIA, Blanca. Subtitling Television Series. A Corpus-Driven Study of Police Procedurals. Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, New York, Wien, Peter Lang, 2020, 248 pp., ISBN 978-1-78707-796-6 (print), ISBN 978-1-78707-798-0 (ePub)

The Audiovisual Translation (AVT) and Media Accessibility fields have found an ongoing interest in corpus research both for descriptive purposes (Matamala, 2008; Baños, 2013; Reviers, 2017) and for teaching purposes (Rica Peromingo, 2019; Baños, 2021). In an interdisciplinary fashion, Blanca Arias-Badia’s book Subtitling Television Series. A Corpus-Driven Study of Police Procedurals specifically takes on the task of describing the principal linguistic features of crime fiction television scripts and their corresponding Spanish subtitles. Its interdisciplinary nature lies on the combination of Television Studies, Linguistics and Translation Studies (TS). Notably, the author explores the notion of norms and patterns through the lens of these three disciplines, all by situating the source text and the target text in the spoken word to written language continuum. The book follows a clear structure of nine chapters including a theoretical and methodological contextualisation of the (quantitative and qualitative) morphosyntactic and lexical analysis of the Corpus of Police Procedurals [...]

Posthumanist Solidarity: The Political and Ethical Imaginations of Artificial Intelligence from Battlestar Galactica to Raised by Wolves

A number of twenty-first century television series explore the irruption of AI devices into our daily lives, highlighting not only human interaction with AI, but posing disturbing and new ontological considerations: humans wondering how they are different from machines, or those of machines being unaware that they are machines and only discovering so belatedly. Within these series, the emergence of these thoughts is accompanied by the staging of interspecies friendship and romance: the metaphysical question of freedom gives way to the question of attachment, and then the problem of autonomy gives way to that of interdependence. It is this passage from metaphysical speculation to political reflection that I would like to demonstrate.

Series Under Threat

Lockdown has given us an occasion to discover new television series and to revisit others. TV series accompany us in our ordinary lives, but they can also be a resource or refuge in extraordinary situations. As the enduring success of Friends proves, they provide us with universes of comfort. TV series provide strong common cultural referents, which populate both ordinary conversations and political debates. TV series, by virtue of their aesthetic format (their duration, weekly and seasonal regularity, and the fact that they are, or were until recently, usually viewed in the context of the home), the attachment they inspire to their characters, the democratization and diversification of modes of viewing them (internet, streaming, discussion forums), make possible a specific form of education and constitution of a public. TV shows are hence a medium for political and ethical discussion. The article studies two series, Homeland and The Bureau, which are paradigmatic examples of a genre that has grown exponentially since the beginning of the century, and which we refer to as the “security series” genre. These series are great works of art and can also be seen as powerful tools for educating and informing the public.

The Dialogic Expansion of Garcia’s We: Chronotopes, Ethics, and Politics in The Expanse Series

Popular culture could be understood as a political battleground where conflicting meanings are inscribed into the “ordinary objects” that constitute that public sphere. This is also true for science fiction television series. This article critically examines how political matters and ethical agencies are represented within The Expanse, a series that takes place within a speculative twenty-fourth century milky way. Firstly, I will situate The Expanse within its generic “system of reference.” Then, I will illustrate how political matters are represented as conjoined with the ethical. While the ethical refers to actions of persons, politics refers to fictional conceptions of what Tristan Garcia’s terms we-ourselves, understood as conflicting and overlapping conceptions of “we.” The conjunction between the political and the ethical in The Expanse is spatiotemporal: the characters, the events they are entangled in, and the spaces that connect discrete events develop through fictional and literal time. I argue that the science fictional representations of “we-ourselves,” and the specific spatiotemporal representational capacities of the television series format, can be understood through the application of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of the chronotope and the dialogic. That is, The Expanse’s we-representations are chronotopic and the refractive rhetoric of television is dialogic.

Kaahailua idyllissä

Tutkin artikkelissani lähipeluun menetelmin, miten kotimainen digitaalinen peli My Summer Car (Suomi 2016) esittää 1990-luvun lama-ajan Suomen maaseutua ja miesten joutilaisuutta. My Summer Car on yhden ihmisen, Johannes Rojolan, projekti, ja siten se kuvaa tekijänsä näkemyksiä esittämästään aikakaudesta. Pelin vertailukohtana käytetään maaseutua ja joutilaisuutta käsitteleviä humoristisia elokuvia sekä televisiosarjoja. Kysyn, miten peli eroaa niistä.Esitän, että My Summer Car luo lama-ajan Suomesta omannäköisensä tulkinnan, jossa pelien omaleimaisuus vaikuttaa joutilaisuuden kokemiseen. Selviytymispeligenre pakottaa pelaajan aktiiviseksi toimijaksi, jolloin pelaajan positio suhteessa muihin pelin joutilaisiin hahmoihin muuttuu. Tällöin joutilaisuuden ja aktiivisen toimijuuden raja hämärtyy, ja peli pakottaa pelaajan näkemään joutilaisuuden monipuolisemmin. Joutilaisuus–aktiivisuus-asetelma on My Summer Carissa erilainen verrattuna kotimaisiin elokuviin ja televisiosarjoihin. My Summer Carissa maaseudun pelillistäminen on tarkoittanut sitä, että poikakulttuuriin olennaisesti kuuluva homososiaalisuus on poissa, sillä pelistä puuttuu käytännössä nuorten miesten yhteisöllisyys. Jäljelle jää vain rappioromantiikan ideaali, jota toistetaan.Avainsanat: joutilaisuus, rappioromantiikka, maaseutu, nostalgisointi, digitaaliset pelitSpeeding in the Idyll. The Representation of 90s Recession Era Finnish Countryside and Idleness in My Summer CarIn this article I explore through close playing method how the Finnish digital game My Summer Car (2016) depicts the fictional Finnish countryside during the 90s recession and the idleness of men. My Summer Car is a project of one person, Johannes Rojola, and thus describes the author’s views on the era he presents. The game’s representation is compared with other humorous films and television series situated in the countryside. The research focuses on the idleness represented in My Summer Car and asks how the game differs from these other Finnish audiovisual products.I claim that My Summer Car creates a unique interpretation of the recession in Finland, in which the uniqueness of digital games affects the experience of idleness. The survival game genre forces the player to become an active player, changing the player’s position in relation to other idle characters in the game. In this case, the line between idleness and active action is blurred and the game forces the player to see idleness in a more versatile way. The idleness–activity setting in My Summer Car is different from other Finnish movies and TV series. Gamification of My Summer Car’s countryside causes homosociality, an integral part of boy culture, to vanish, as there is no sense of community among young men in the game. All that remains is the repeated ideal of romanticized decadence.Keywords: idleness, romanticized decadence, countryside, nostalgization, digital games

Aspiration and the Violence of Gentrification in Marvel’s Luke Cage

This article analyzes the cultural politics of gentrification as they are deployed in the Netflix series Marvel’s Luke Cage. Based on the comic book character, Luke Cage, who was created in response to the popularity of the 1970s blaxploitation films, and the Black Power movement, the television series portrays a Black superhero who defends contemporary Harlem and its people from crime and exploitation. Critically recognized and widely watched during its first airing from 2016 to 2018, Luke Cage was a breakthrough television series that not only centered a Black superhero but directed itself to Black experience and public dialogue during the time of Black Life Matters. The Harlem portrayed in Luke Cage is both a specific community, and a virtual invocation of Black community aspiration, and the structural violence of gentrification. The violent emotions and displacement of gentrification that are presented in the series represent a form of intramural dialogue between the Black creatives working on the show and the broader Black public that is engaging with the long-time debates around the meaning and future of Harlem.

Rewatching, Film, and New Television

Those of us who are captivated by new television (the sort of serialized television that began largely in the early 1990s), often find ourselves rewatching episodes or whole series. Why? What is the philosophical significance of the phenomenon of rewatching? In what follows, I engage with the ontology of television series in order to think about these questions around rewatching. I conclude by reflecting on what the entire discussion might suggest about the medium of new television, about ourselves, and also about our world and the possibilities of art in it.