Re/entangling Irish and Nigerian diasporas: Colonial amnesias, decolonial aesthetics and archive-assemblage praxis

This article discusses the practice of ‘genealogical re/entanglement’ developed in the context of a project about the ways colonial amnesias obscure the connections between the histories of Anglo-European colonialities and the crises of contemporary migrations. This methodology appropriates archival and assemblage art making practices to make visible and ‘familialise’ the prior encounters of Irish and Nigerian diasporans that remain unknown in Ireland, towards reshaping the grounds of present and future relations. The centrality of embodied knowledges in decolonial scholarship creates an imperative of not only grounding theoretical work in the materialities of lived experiences but also confronting the colonial inheritances that underpin the methods employed to engage them. As such, in the contexts of this project, the development of the methodology became a project in itself. In this article, I reflect on the decolonial interrogations and method(il)logical transfigurations of the Western art and research traditions that intersected with and co-constructed the substantive analysis of Irish and Nigerian diasporic entanglements. An interactive account of how the method operates provides an opportunity to explore the ways the interconnectedness of the aesthesic, epistemological and pedagogical projects underpinning decolonial work combine to constitute a dynamic praxis.

A crosslinguistic study of some extended uses of what-based interrogative expressions in Chinese, English, and Korean

Interrogative pronouns such as what in English, shenme in Mandarin Chinese, and mwe/mwusun in Korean all have developed extended uses beyond interrogation. Such uses may include filling a gap in conversation, softening a speaker’s epistemic stance, and indicating strong emotions such as surprises or incredulity. Yet there is little research dealing with crosslinguistic patterns with large corpora of interactive discourse data. In this paper, we investigate the extended uses based on corpora of multiple telephone calls from the three languages. We show that eight categories of extended use can be identified in the corpora and that most of the extended uses tend to fall in the negative territory. We provide a pragmatic interactive account for this phenomenon and hope that the taxonomy and coding scheme developed here can serve as a starting point for future crosslinguistic and corpus-based comparative studies of what-like tokens as well as of the discourse pragmatic uses of other interrogative forms.

Variable Left-hemisphere Language and Orthographic Lateralization Reduces Right-hemisphere Face Lateralization

It is commonly believed that, in right-handed individuals, words and faces are processed by distinct neural systems: one in the left hemisphere (LH) for words and the other in the right hemisphere (RH) for faces. Emerging evidence suggests, however, that hemispheric selectivity for words and for faces may not be independent of each other. One recent account suggests that words become lateralized to the LH to interact more effectively with language regions, and subsequently, as a result of competition with words for representational space, faces become lateralized to the RH. On this interactive account, left-handed individuals, who as a group show greater variability with respect to hemispheric language dominance, might be expected to show greater variability in their degree of RH lateralization of faces as well. The current study uses behavioral measures and ERPs to compare the hemispheric specialization for both words and faces in right- and left-handed adult individuals. Although both right- and left-handed groups demonstrated LH over RH superiority in discrimination accuracy for words, only the right-handed group demonstrated RH over LH advantage in discrimination accuracy for faces. Consistent with this, increased right-handedness was related to an increase in RH superiority for face processing, as measured by the strength of the N170 ERP component. Interestingly, the degree of RH behavioral superiority for face processing and the amplitude of the RH N170 for faces could be predicted by the magnitude of the N170 ERP response to words in the LH. These results are discussed in terms of a theoretical account in which the typical RH face lateralization fails to emerge in individuals with atypical language lateralization because of weakened competition from the LH representation of words.

Cutting dark matter. Professional capacity and organizational change

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to discuss the impact of organizational change on the competence of controllers in rail infrastructure operations. Controllers are a critical link in providing rail services. They guide train traffic 7/24 in real time from within control rooms by daily responding to a multitude of disturbances. Market reforms have radically changed their work conditions by unbundling and re-bundling control rooms. Design/methodology/approach – Ethnographically inspired research has been performed at the work stations of controllers in both unbundled and re-bundled, both Dutch and British control rooms between 2007 and 2011. The author observed how controllers deal with moderate disturbances and discusses the nature of their underlying professional capacities, what guides their decision making in discretion. Implications are discussed how organizational change affects these capacities in case of unbundling and re-bundling control rooms. Findings – The paper shows how to gain a more explicit understanding of what controllers, as professionals, essentially think and do. An open-interactive account of professional capacity emerges, in contrast to the private-cognitive view widespread in literature. Both conceptualizations of professional capacities have radically different implications for their susceptibility to organizational change. Originality/value – This paper reveals an urgent perspective on the impact of market reforms, through the accompanying organizational change, on professional capacity at the operational level of providing public rail services.