Developing the Metalinguistic Competence of Engineering Students

The paper discusses the socio-communicative function of the engineer’s foreign language training in which content is based on materials relating to the latest global technological advances and understanding of the essence of production culture in different countries. It discusses the structure and content of foreign language training taking into account the potential of multilingualism, technical communication and metalinguistic competence. Foreign language training contributes to the formation of linguistic, communicative and metacognitive skills. It sets out the modern international requirements in an engineering university, identifies the contradictions and features of pedagogical forms, methods and tools, and sets out the content and structure of multilingualism, technical communication and metalinguistic competence. A methodology for the implementation of foreign language training in combination with multilingualism, technical communication and metalinguistic competence is proposed and proved through the realization of group international study trips. Here, the students showed an understanding of technologies in foreign languages and a metalinguistic awareness focusing on the cultural traditions of the region and local features of production. The article argues for a conscious approach to deeper linguistic knowledge, cultures of different countries and technologies with advanced language and communications requirements in the field of science and technology, combining linguistic and engineering thinking in the human mind for a more complete understanding of the essence and content of engineering education.

Blurring Genres and Violating Guild Norms A Review of Reviews of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

In this essay—a review of the reviews of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019)—we ask whether the published reactions to Zuboff’s tome say something about the legibility problem. After reading them all, we came to wonder if the reviews themselves construct an additional hurdle to knowing Google, Facebook, and the rest: the Babelist din of competing knowledge cultures. With so many distinct dialects, the project of general understanding might be hobbled from the start.

Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Ocean Observing: A Review of Successful Partnerships

Understanding and management of the marine environment requires respect for, and inclusion of, Indigenous knowledge, cultures, and traditional practices. The Aha Honua, an ocean observing declaration from Coastal Indigenous Peoples, calls on the ocean observing community to “formally recognize the traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples,” and “to learn and respect each other’s ways of knowing.” Ocean observing systems typically adopt open data sharing as a core principle, often requiring that data be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR). Without modification, this approach to Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) would mean disregarding historical and ongoing injustices and imbalances in power, and information management principles designed to address these wrongs. TEK from global ocean observing is not equitable or desirable. Ocean observing systems tend to align with settler geography, but their chosen regions often include Indigenous coastal-dwelling communities that have acted as caretakers and stewards of the land and ocean for thousands of years. Achieving the call of Aha Honua will require building relationships that recognize Indigenous peoples play a special role in the area of ocean stewardship, care, and understanding. This review examines the current understanding of how Indigenous TEK can be successfully coordinated or utilized alongside western scientific systems, specifically the potential coordination of TEK with ocean observing systems. We identify relevant methods and collaborative projects, including cases where TEK has been collected, digitized and the meta(data) has been made open under some or all the FAIR principles. This review also highlights enabling factors that notably contribute to successful outcomes in digitization, and mitigation measures to avoid the decontextualization of TEK. Recommendations are primarily value- and process-based, rather than action-based, and acknowledge the key limitation that this review is based on extant written knowledge. In cases where examples are provided, or local context is necessary to be concrete, we refer to a motivating example of the nascent Atlantic Regional Association of the Canadian Integrated Ocean Observing System and their desire to build relationships with Indigenous communities.

Making Truth in Early Modern Catholicism

Scholarship has come to value the uncertainties haunting early modern knowledge cultures; indeed, the awareness of the fragility and plurality of knowledge is now offered as a key element of "Baroque Science". Yet early modern actors never questioned the possibility of certainty itself; including the notion that truth is out there, universal, and therefore situated at one remove from human manipulations. This book addresses the central question of how early modern actors managed not to succumb to postmodern relativism, amidst uncertainties and blatant disagreements about the nature of God, Man, and the Universe. An international and interdisciplinary team of experts in fields ranging from Astronomy to Business Administration to Theology investigate a number of practices that are central to maintaining and functionalizing the notion of absolute truth, the certainty that could be achieved about it, and of the credibility of a wide plethora of actors in differentiating fields of knowledge.

Practices of sustainability and the enactment of their natures/cultures: Ecosystem services, rights of nature, and geoengineering

Possible trajectories of sustainability are based on different concepts of nature. The article starts out from three trajectories of sustainability (modernization, transformation and control) and reconstructs one characteristic practice for each path with its specific conceptions of nature. The notion that nature provides human societies with relevant ecosystem services is typical of the path of modernization. Nature is reified and monetarized here, with regard to its utility for human societies. Practices of transformation, in contrast, emphasize the intrinsic ethical value of nature. This becomes particularly apparent in discourses on the rights of nature, whose starting point can be found in Latin American indigenous discourses, among others. Control practices such as geoengineering are based on earth-systemic conceptions of nature, in which no distinction is made between natural and social systems. The aim is to control the earth system as a whole in order for human societies to remain viable. Practices of sustainability thus show different ontological understandings of nature (dualistic or monistic) on the one hand and (implicit) ethics and sacralizations (anthropocentric or biocentric) on the other. The three reconstructed natures/cultures have different ontological and ethical affinities and conflict with each other. They are linked to very different knowledge cultures and life-worlds, which answer very differently to the question of what is of value in a society and in nature and how these values ought to be protected.

Intersectionality in digital feminist knowledge cultures: the practices and politics of a travelling theory

Intersectionality is a travelling theory; now enjoying significant contemporary visibility and popularity in the feminist blogosphere, it has moved across disciplines and borders in ways that are quite distinct from the scholarly critique developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw some time ago. In this article, I consider how intersectionality is translated, and retheorised, as an intertwined set of everyday knowledges and associated governmental practices that both echo and diverge from some of the complexities and politics of its wide-ranging scholarly uptake. Drawing on interviews with self-identifying feminists in a pilot project mapping contemporary Australian digital feminisms, this article explores two overarching patterns in intersectionality’s mobilisation. First, the shift to understanding intersectionality as an everyday conceptual grid plotting women’s differences along one axis, and measuring relative privilege and disadvantage on the other, recentring whiteness and liberal multicultural models of diversity and inclusion. Second, the transformation of intersectionality into an abstract, individualistic model of conduct, involving the citation and classification of ‘white feminist’ behaviour elsewhere, in frequent judgments on US celebrity culture. As such, intersectionality, while seemingly popular, often remained curiously ‘theoretical’ and divorced from embodied, everyday practices. I suggest in what follows that such a model of intersectionality raises questions of the commercial, racialised, political and mediated conditions that shape the theory’s visibility and materialisation.

The Document as Epistemic Object: Notes on Archival Knowledge Cultures

This article strategically resituates scholarly engagement with archival documents within the media ecology and the epistemic culture that sustains literary and cultural studies, noting affinities between historical and contemporary configurations as well as between theoretical and medial-material dimensions of archives. Based on current debates on the growing relevance of archival documents in American Studies and adjacent fields, it stakes out a framework that leans on recent work in a small branch of contemporary literary theory focused on historical epistemology, especially with regard to the notion of ‘epistemic objects’. Engaging these theoretical concerns, the article discusses concrete archival collections and documents, including letters by the novelist Willa Cather and items from a capacious archive documenting the emergence and evolution of Andrew Carnegie’s public library philanthropy. I outline several ways in which the shape and the aesthetics of such archives embody the information economies and epistemic situations of the past – in this case, the formative period around 1900. Finally, the article addresses the digital document overload that confronts the contemporary researcher and comments on the emerging archival knowledge culture of today’s humanities.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter reviews what the previous chapters have revealed about cultural primatology. It compares the knowledge cultures of Christophe Boesch's field station, Michael Tomasello's laboratory, Tetsuro Matsuzawa's laboratory, and Matsuzawa's field station with each other to map a space of no-longer-available possibilities. Boesch's fieldwork on wild chimpanzees and Tomasello's laboratory experiments on captive chimpanzees contradicted each other regarding the capacity of Pan troglodytes for culture and cooperation. Boesch and Tomasello could not agree because the fieldworker doubted the ecological validity of the experimenter's findings, while the experimenter denied that field observations could provide any insights into what caused the observed behaviors, leaving chimpanzee ethnographers unable to rule out alternative explanations of supposedly cultural behaviors. Meanwhile, Matsuzawa's laboratory research at the Kyoto University Primate Research Institute and his field research in Bossou presented an interesting contrast to the disagreements between the two because he integrated lab and field in his own work. He studied the social learning of nut cracking through field observation, field experiment, participation observation, and controlled laboratory experiment — and conceived of his synthesis of all these approaches as an expression of Japanese holism.

Speaking bodies – silenced voices: Child protection and the knowledge culture of ‘evidencing’

Using the metaphors body and voice and drawing on critical contributions on biopolitics, this article interrogates children’s participation rights in a knowledge culture of ‘evidencing’. With child welfare and protection practice as an empirical example, I analyse written assessment reports from a Swedish child welfare agency, all exemplifying how social workers evidence needs for protection and reasons for removing children from the home. I discuss how ‘evidencing’ equals a knowledge culture of seeing-believing and predicting-believing and the search for visibly damaged bodies and underdeveloped minds. I furthermore problematise how such conceptualisation of evidencing foregrounds children’s ‘speaking’ bodies while silencing their voices. By showing these manifestations of evidencing, this critical contribution discusses some wider epistemic concerns for fields influenced by the knowledge cultures of ‘the evidence-based’.

Knowledge Hegemonies in the Early Modern World

This series is devoted to the social-cultural study of early modern knowledge cultures (ca.1450-1750). It promotes studies that highlight the importance of science as a collective praxis, understood as a contested field informed by political, philosophical and confessional struggles for cultural hegemony, and in connection with social and economic interests. In how far did political antagonisms, ideological struggles, and religious tensions hinder scientific development or underpin it? How did the modern construction of identity along confessional, linguistic, and political lines affect the ethos and epistemic values of the sciences? The goal of our series is to publish source-based studies that combine the online presentation of historical sources with accompanying critical monographs.