Language socialization and academic discourse in English as a Foreign Language contexts: A research agenda

In this paper, I argue for expanding language socialization research on the academic discourse socialization of speakers of English as an additional language to less-commonly researched settings outside of English-dominant countries. Following an overview of some theoretical and methodological issues involved in conducting such research, I lay out a research agenda, focusing on several topics and issues that have the potential to illuminate issues of interest in both language socialization and second language acquisition regarding how competence and community are defined in a globalized, multilingual world. These include: (a) closer investigation of presumed ‘cultural differences’ between ‘Western’ and ‘Asian’ academic discourse practices, (b) the effect of social categories such as ethnicity and ‘nonnative speaker’ status on the construction of ‘expert’ and ‘novice’ identities in these settings, (c) the role of socializing agents outside of the classroom, and (d) the extent to which students in these settings are being socialized into practices and ideologies that promote multicompetence.

Role of Cultural Capital and Cultural Reproduction on Youth Development in India: A Generational Perspective

The present study endeavored to understand the perceptions of Indian older adults (age 60 and above) from urban centres of New Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai, about the state of youth development in India through applying a generational perspective. Drawing from our understanding of Bourdieu’s concept of cultural reproduction of values, the study explored older adults’ thoughts about the current state of Indian youth concerning their civic participation and contribution to the development of Indian society. Additionally, it sought to find familial roles that the elderly would like to undertake to support their younger family members. Thematic analysis revealed that the older adults in this study perceive that youths are not completely engaged in positive youth development and need to contribute more towards their civic societies. Additionally, the older adults expressed their interest in occupying the role of secondary socializing agents in the family due to their perceived intergenerational differences with youth.

Sexuality in Emerging Adulthood

This book provides an in-depth examination of an important domain of development during emerging adulthood—sexuality. Emerging adulthood, which is a complex and dynamic developmental period, uniquely affords individuals a variety of choices with regard to sexuality; this volume addresses these various facets of sexuality to provide a comprehensive overview of the state of the field. The first section of the volume offers conceptualizations and foundational perspectives on sexuality in emerging adulthood, with topics including theory, developmental considerations, sexual behavior, sexual beliefs and attitudes, associations with romance, casual sex, and sexual orientation. The second section systematically examines contexts and socializing agents of sexual development, including parents, peers, media, and religion. The third section narrows in on the overarching theme of the series by addressing factors leading to flourishing and floundering in the area of sexuality during emerging adulthood, such as effects of early adversity, sexual health, sexual well-being, sexuality and mental health, and sexual assault. Accompanying seven of the chapters are brief scientific reports offering novel related research. The volume also contains four method tutorials that discuss topics in sex research such as ethical considerations, recruitment and incentive strategies, and identity-affirming methods. Concluding the volume is a chapter presenting innovative new perspectives on integration of sexual health promotion and sexual violence prevention.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the volume “Sexuality in Emerging Adulthood” and offers a overview of the five organizing sections of the book: conceptualization and foundational perspectives, methodological trends, contexts and socializing agents, flourishing and floundering, and practical applications. Each of the five sections within the volume review empirical work that collectively examines the diversity of experiences and outcomes of sexuality in emerging adults. The goal of the volume as a whole is to provide a comprehensive and nuanced review of what we know about sexuality in emerging adulthood to inform both the broader study of sexuality and that of emerging adulthood. Indeed, the collective chapters offer strong evidence that emerging adulthood can afford the opportunity to establish both productive and destructive sexual trajectories; the identification of factors associated with each of these trajectors should prove useful for application by educators, health professionals, human service providers, and policymakers.

Gender, Nonhuman Animals, and Education

Educational theorists are increasingly concerned with the areas of environmental education, ecological education, and animal studies. As social and political efforts to “go green” and make our industrial and personal habits more sustainable and ethical increase, schools as socializing agents take up these initiatives. Students already engage with nonhumans in significant ways in schools: they might interact with live nonhuman animals in extracurricular activities; they might dissect nonhuman animals in their science classes; they might eat the bodies of nonhuman animals at lunch; and they might read about literary or poetic representations of nonhuman animals in English classes. A continuously developing area of educational theory is how the ways in which students engage with nonhuman animals is gendered. Posthumanism and ecofeminism are philosophical paradigms that educational theorists engage with to think through the ways hierarchies of sentiency, humanity, and rationality are propagated by literary, cultural, and metaphorical representations of nonhuman others. There is a long history of women-animal comparisons that is evident in the literature and other cultural artifacts that we teach about in schools. Many students are also served animals as food in school cafeterias. Ecofeminist scholars and scholars of educational philosophy are likewise concerned with the gendered aspects of animal bodies as food and how the ontological representations of the bodies of women and their labor manifest in schools. Educational researchers are investigating these literary, metaphorical, and cultural comparisons.

Informal Volunteering and Socialization Effects: Examining Modelling and Encouragement by Parents and Partner

Informal volunteering is seen as an important indicator of social relations and community life. We therefore investigate the impact of various socialization practices on informal volunteering, being small helping behaviours outside of organizations for people outside the household. From theoretical notions on socialization, we hypothesize that experiencing extensive prosocial socialization practices promotes informal volunteering. We examine socialization processes of both modelling and encouragement and consider two socializing agents: parents and partners. We test our expectations employing the sixth wave of the Family Survey Dutch Population (N = 2464) that included unique measures on socialization as well as informal volunteering and holds important control variables. Our results indicated that parental modelling, partner modelling and partner encouragement were all positively related to informal volunteering, but that parental encouragement was not significantly related to informal volunteering. Our paper, thus, underscores that socialization practices are relevant in nurturing social relations and community life.

Coaches’ Experiences of Morality in English Professional Football Environments: Recommendations for Creating a Moral Atmosphere

Coaches are key socializing agents who influence the sociomoral context. A function of socialization in coaching is the imparting of values and ideology, which guide behavior. English professional football is known for authoritarian and subservient cultures whereby coaches will enforce cultural norms and values, which consequently shape their players’ moral development. Therefore, from a contextual viewpoint, professional football serves as a suitable site for exploring coaches’ views of morality. This study consisted of two aims: (a) explore English professional football coaches’ experiences of morality in football and (b) share coaches’ accounts of how they create and manage a moral atmosphere. Semistructured interviews were conducted with eight male professional English football coaches. Thematic analysis resulted in two general dimensions: coaches’ experiences of morality and recommendations for creating and managing a moral atmosphere. Coaches shared accounts of the moral conflicts and antisocial behaviors they experienced. The findings suggest that coaches struggle to define morality while highlighting the lack of coach education on the topic. Furthermore, similarities were observed in relation to coaches’ recommendations for creating and managing a moral atmosphere. Therefore, the study concludes by providing a selection of guiding principles that professional football coaches could implement when creating and managing a moral atmosphere.

A Rational-Choice Model of Covid-19 Transmission with Endogenous Quarantining and Two-sided Prevention

This paper offers a parsimonious, rational-choice model to study the effect of pre-existing inequalities on the transmission of COVID-19. Agents decide whether to "go out" (or self-quarantine) and, if so, whether to wear protection such as masks. Three elements distinguish the model from existing work. First, non-symptomatic agents do not know if they are infected. Second, some of these agents unknowingly transmit infections. Third, we permit two-sided prevention via the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions: the probability of a person catching the virus from another depends on protection choices made by each. We find that a mean-preserving increase in pre-existing income inequality unambiguously increases the equilibrium proportion of unprotected, socializing agents and may increase or decrease the proportion who self-quarantine. Strikingly, while higher pre-COVID inequality may or may not raise the overall risk of infection, it increases the risk of disease in social interactions.

The Politics of Parenthood: Attitudes, Behavior, Policy, and Theory

As the rhetoric around parenthood has increased in the political world, so too has the scholarly focus on parenthood within political science and related fields. This article attempts to account for the many ways in which parenthood is political and has implications for the study of politics. In this article, we consider parenthood as a role, identity, and life event that has the potential to shape the attitudes and behaviors of individuals. We also review literature on the constitutive roles that public policies and political institutions play in structuring the meanings and practices of parenthood. In this survey, the unit and topics of analysis differ across areas of study, varying from parent, child, candidate, officeholder, historical era, or policy domain. The literature is also characterized by the use of different data sources, methodologies, and research designs, all of which vary in their ability to isolate the independent effect of parenthood on the outcome of interest and which we acknowledge is largely focused on heterosexual partnerships and two-parent households. The scholarship here is organized around four major themes: 1) Parenthood and political socialization, 2) Parenthood and political attitudes and behavior in the mass public, 3) Parenthood and political behavior among elites, and 4) Parenthood as terrain for state-building and public policies. In this structure, we first review some central works within the literature on parents as primary socializing agents of their children’s early political orientations, while also discussing the smaller literature on children as socializing agents onto parents. Second, we examine research on how parenthood shapes the political lives of adults in the mass public. We consider literature regarding how parenthood shapes the policy stances of political elites and literature examining the political attitudes and behaviors of voters and activists. We also review research on how parenthood shapes how voters evaluate political candidates. We then consider how parenthood operates as a landscape for state-building through public policy and political institutions, and how parenthood functions as a social arrangement around which public policies are built. While scholarship outside of political science examines aspects of parenthood with implications for politics, this review covers primarily research within political science. Moreover, we touch only lightly upon topics that have generated vast amounts of scholarship, such as the politics of women’s fertility and reproductive rights. Finally, we are mindful that approaches to the study of parenthood that examine how gender, gender identity, race, sexuality, disability, and class converge to shape distinct parenting experiences, identities, vulnerabilities, and policy needs are unfortunately uncommon within political science—we hope this bibliography might underscore the need for such research in the near future. While we primarily focus on work from the American corpus, we include cross-national studies and perspectives which highlight that national context (i.e., role of the welfare state) shapes the ways in which parenthood matters for politics and policy. The authors thank Hayden Latimer-Ireland, Linda Wang, and Anja Parish for their help with the production of this manuscript.

Cultural Psychology

Cultural psychology draws upon major psychological topics, theories, and principles to illustrate the importance of culture in psychological inquiry. It explores how culture broadly connects to psychological processing across diverse cultural communities and settings, highlighting its application to everyday life events and situations, and presenting culture as a complex medium in which individuals acquire skills, values, and abilities. One central theme is the view of culture as a mental and physical construct that individuals live, experience, share, perform, and learn; a second core theme is how culture shapes growth and development. Culture-specific and cross-cultural examples reveal connections between culture and psychological phenomena. The text is multidisciplinary and presents different perspectives on how culture shapes human phenomena. It provides an introduction to this field; covers the history of cultural psychology, cultural evolution, and cultural ecology; explains methods; and examines language and nonverbal communication, and cognition and perception. Topics investigating social behavior include the self, identity, and personality; social relationships, social attitudes, and intergroup contact in a global world; and social influence, aggression, violence, and war. Topics addressing growth and development include human development and its processes, transitions, and rituals across the life span; and socializing agents, socialization practices, and child activities. Additional topics explore emotion and motivation, mental health and psychopathology, and future directions for cultural psychology. Chapters contain teaching and learning tools, including case studies, multidisciplinary contributions, thought-provoking questions, class and experiential activities, a chapter summary, and additional print and media resources.