“Come, Dark-eyed Sleep”: Michael Field and the Performance of the Lyric as a Radical Fantasy

This article seeks to illustrate how the Michael Fields articulate their Sapphic poetry in Long Ago (1889) not only in keeping with their own Shakespearean aspirations and with Robert Browning’s hybrid formula of dramatic lyrics, but also in connection with Jonathan Culler’s theory of the lyric as a performative genre. Much recent scholarship has broken ground in the rediscovery and reappraisal of the Fields’ literary stature, yet the general critical approach has been divisive in addressing their poetry and their verse dramas separately. Some critics have taken heed of how their lyrics in general exhibit an intrinsic dramatic temper, yet no systematic inquiry has discussed how this lyrical dramaticity is manifest in any particular instance. Thus, this article singles out Long Ago’s second poem for its powerful performative energy, offering a close reading of each line, and demonstrating that it amounts to a hybrid dramatic lyric, as well as a tragic and transgressive performance in which a new Sappho takes centre stage as a Dionysian apologist of radical erotic fantasies.

Trajectories of anticipation: Preconceptuality and the task of reading habit

The article characterizes Peirce’s concept of habit as a major contribution to a Peircean concept of preconceptuality, first, in relation to its function in the sign process, and second, in relation to other concepts of preconceptuality in cultural studies. Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of prejudice, Michel Foucault’s notions of the preconceptual and the dispositif, and Hans Blumenberg’s conception of metaphor all share certain key characteristics with Peirce’s notion of habit. The same comparison also highlights the fact that certain elements are missing from the current discourse on Peirce’s notion of habit: although any rendition of the concept of habit itself implicitly relies on a theory of historicity and of rule-association, these aspects only emerge explicitly in comparison with theories that more explicitly focus on such aspects. Another question raised in the context of such a comparison is the relevance of habit for theories of conceptuality. Peirce claims that descriptions of concepts are best realized through the description of the habits involved in them. A major part of a concept’s coordinative power lies with the habits associated with the concept. However, no systematic inquiry into the possibility of rendering actual habits more definitive in comprehension has been undertaken. An attempt is therefore made to remedy that situation by elaborating on those aspects of Peirce’s theory of habit relevant to a theory of “reading” habit, and to sketch an outline of such a theory.

Exploring Action Research from a Social Field Perspective

In this piece we share our discovery process as action researchers in an online, global change initiative that emerged during the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic, 2020. In the spirit of sharing our work "in the making" we aim to make visible our own reflection process and the questions that surface from it. In particular, we share and explore our realization that in order to fully serve the transformational intention of the initiative and the research itself, we needed to expand our research framework mid-process. The framework that best serves the emergent and transformative nature of the initiative is one that both supports awareness-based action and generates widely applicable knowledge; that integrates a variety of perspectives on social phenomena (first-, second-, and third-person); and that aims to bring systematic inquiry both to the observable phenomena and the deeper underlying dimensions. The approach requires us to make visible our assumptions and to integrate and validate different epistemologies, including relational, intuitive and aesthetic knowing. As such, the approach to research we suggest here can be thought of as an epistemological framework itself.

Mapping Emoji Usage Among Youth

Emoji is now a popular inclusion in technology-mediated communication and a part of everyday expression of users. Yet, there is a dearth of scientifically designed research studies focussing on the human implications of the use of emojis. Limited systematic inquiry in this area is restricted to technical studies focussing on algorithm analysis of humongous quantitative data ignoring the people who are posting these emojis. Therefore, in the present study, an attempt is made to study the use of emojis from an individual’s behavioural perspective borrowing from the classic ‘contagion theory’ and the ‘information-signal theory’. A mixed research approach was adopted to study young university student’s emoji usage behaviour. Focus group discussion (FGD) was conducted on 11 participants with an average age of 22.5 years. The discussion was transcribed and thematic analysis was then conducted from which a survey instrument was developed which was administered to 250 university students. These survey data were then analysed using exploratory factor analysis. Results show that social media platforms, linguistic pattern, social relationships, emotional connect and level of formality and gender emerged as important factors that drive emoji usage. The findings of the study indicate the psychological implications and socio-behavioural impact of emoji usage which can be used for creating regulations and norms. What appears to be casual pictorial supplement of textual messages holds the power to be developed as a stand-alone language which could impact the usage of language-dependent communication.

Conceptualizing, Measuring, and Evaluating Improvement Networks

Educators and education-related organizations are increasingly joining and forming networks to improve learning opportunities and outcomes for students. The turn to networks reflects growing recognition in the education field that problems in education are too complex for any one educator or organization to solve on their own and that collaboration has the potential to accelerate improvement. While there is a history of networks in education to support informal sharing and collaboration, improvement networks are intentionally designed and structured to organize systematic inquiry that enables educators to learn how to better respond to a specific problem of practice. For example, Tony Bryk, Louis Gomez, and Alicia Grunow from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching introduced the concept of the “networked improvement community” to the educational field. These networks bring together communities of educators, reformers, researchers, and leaders, and they provide a structure for organizing inquiry into the root causes and potential solutions to high-leverage problems, such as inequities in student achievement and college access. This article explores the improvement network concept and ways to measure and evaluate these networks. It is organized into four sections, three of which are further divided into subsections. The first section explores how to conceptualize improvement networks. It makes a crucial distinction between the social organization and technical work of networks, and this distinction is preserved and highlighted in subsequent parts of the article. The second section explores approaches to evaluating improvement networks. This is followed by a section on measuring the technical and social organization of networks. The article concludes with a selected set of cases of improvement network evaluations.

Preparing Scholar-Practitioners for Systemic and Systematic Inquiry: Methodology Published and Practiced

This study explores the methodology presented in four leading educational leadership journals for a period of three years to investigate the predominant methodologies reported in journals most read by faculty members in educational administration or leadership programs. This content analysis study uses frequency and percentages to gather data on the published methodologies of four educational leadership journals. We used an established coding protocol, and our coding was not interpretive. The analysis revealed that qualitative methods were published more frequently than quantitative methods in the leading educational leadership journals with an emphasis on studies using a descriptive qualitative design, a descriptive quantitative design, correlational research, and case studies. This study replicated a study conducted by Wells, Kolek, Williams, and Saunders (2015) which was a content analysis of three major higher education journals to examine the methodologic characteristics of published research from 1996-2000 and 2006-2010 respectively. The authors discuss the relevance of the study for EdD programs in Educational Administration/Leadership. The analysis may inform decisions about how to best develop scholar-practitioners’ capacity to use systemic and systematic inquiry to solve complex problems of practice.

How Document Sampling and Vocabulary Pruning Affect the Results of Topic Models

Topic modeling enables researchers to explore large document corpora. Large corpora, however, can be extremely costly to model in terms of time and computing resources. In order to circumvent this problem, two techniques have been suggested: (1) to model random document samples, and (2) to prune the vocabulary of the corpus. Although frequently applied, there has been no systematic inquiry into how the application of these techniques affects the respective models. Using three empirical corpora with different characteristics (news articles, websites, and Tweets), we systematically investigated how different sample sizes and pruning affect the resulting topic models in comparison to models of the full corpora. Our inquiry provides evidence that both techniques are viable tools that will likely not impair the resulting model. Sample-based topic models closely resemble corpus-based models if the sample size is large enough (> 10,000 documents). Moreover, extensive pruning does not compromise the quality of the resultant topics.

Speaking about vision, talking in the name of so much more: A methodological framework for ventriloquial analyses in organization studies

Organizations have long been treated as stable and fixed entities, defined by concrete buildings, catchy names, and strategic goals neatly written on paper. The Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO) school proposes an alternative, practice-grounded conceptualization for studying organizations as emerging in communicative (inter)actions. In so doing, CCO invites organizational scholars to trace back organizational phenomena to how they are communicated into existence. The concept of ventriloquism can help us explain the communicative constitutive view as it depicts how various elements of a situation are communicated into being and make a difference in interaction. However, ventriloquism lacks a proper methodological outline. Taking employee conversations about visions—a classic constituent of organizations—as our venue, we created a four-step framework for ventriloquial analyses and explored how visions are talked into existence. In this paper, we introduce and illustrate our analytical framework, showing how to identify, order, and present ventriloquial effects. We thus provide organizational (communication) scholars with a new methodological tool that facilitates the systematic inquiry into organizing and the organized from a communicative constitutive perspective.

Multiple Representations: A Descriptive Analysis in Chemistry

Teachers sketch diagrams and use other representations as a portion of systematic inquiry in science. This study was consist of a qualitative paradigm that examined the five students’ perceptions of teachers’ instructional strategies with multiple representations in the learning of chemistry. The purposive sampling techniques were used to collect data from 5 students using interview protocol in a natural environment. The audio tapped data were transcribed by the researcher and found that the teacher use of diagram is an interesting activity, teacher draw diagram for imparting the knowledge, uses relevant diagram, lecture-demonstration method is used, using charts graphs and models, assessment is done through conducting test and using questions.

Conclusion

Development entails sustained enhancement of economic and political capabilities across a society’s members and groups. This text presents a conceptual framework, fully developed in Chapters 8 and 9, that addresses the social scientist’s dilemma concerning how to approach systematic inquiry into the myriad complexities of political-economic development. To address pertinent contexts, this framework systematically addresses interactions between asymmetric distributions of power and institutional evolution. It relates distinct types of political settlements to distinct sets of developmental CAPs that shape development. Related inquiry can then focus on how principles from the five core hypotheses operate in specific political-economic contexts. Such analysis can uncover how specific types of policy innovations relate to prospects for successful adoption within specific contexts. This framework can also underlie broad research programs with many theoretical and modeling extensions, as well as multiple testable empirical hypotheses.