Mapping the Good Neighbor

American tourism in Mexico increased significantly during the Good Neighbor era. By creating tourist maps, cartographers on both sides of the border participated in an intentional, ideological process of reshaping these tourists’ views of Mexico. They sought to transform Americans’ perceptions not only of Mexicans and their history but also of the physical environment. Their Mexico was a place of contrast, suspended in the romantic past and engaged in modernity. Although cartographers constructed a new Mexico through their maps, they did not challenge perceptions of an asymmetrical power dynamic that had defined U.S.-Mexico relations and the tourism industry at large. Instead, their maps reinforced, reproduced, and contributed to it. Cartographers, like the maps they created, were not passive or inconsequential actors. Analyzing the ideas, relationships, and myths embedded in their maps expands our understanding of transnational tourism, environmental change, selective history, and imagined communities in the twentieth century.

Corpses and the Protestant cult of the dead

Scholars of the body and religion readily acknowledge that corpses have agency. ‘The work of the dead,’ as Thomas Laqueur puts it, includes everything from sacralizing the landscape to creating imagined communities. Scholars have been less successful, however, in documenting the continuing relations between ordinary Protestants and their departed loved ones. In their focus on cemetery designers and political leaders, historians have overlooked the spiritual journals – mostly by women – that document relations between the living and dead. This article argues that corpses were central to such relations, even for mainstream Protestants whose ministers insisted otherwise. This argument challenges the way most scholars think of Protestantism. Rather than considering it as a religion of internal beliefs and creeds, I emphasize the material and tactile foundations of Protestant belief. And rather than seeing a religion dedicated to maintaining the Reformation’s divide between the living and dead, I put relations with the dead at the heart of lived Protestantism.

Looking for a Bookstore in Town: Intellectual Readers and the Death of “Gutenberg Galaxy”

The author analyses the problems of erosion of the book culture and the role of bookishness in the contemporary Western and Russian identities. While analysing the processes of disappearance and displacement of bookshops, the author presumes that culture of bookstores and communication subcultures in them cannot compete with networks and e-commerce. It is assumed that the logic of capitalism favours the progress of on-line bookstores, specialising in the serial and mass literature while independent bookstores prefer to sell intellectual, non-fiction, and academic books that are not interesting to consumer readers of mass culture. The author tries to analyse causes of private non-mass bookstores crisis. The author believes that intellectuals of 2000s were optimistic in their prognosis for the development of bookstores as spaces of cultural initiatives. By the end of 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the number of independent bookstores decreased significantly when on-line bookstores occupied their place. It is assumed that the cultures of reading, book collections, personal libraries lost the positions they held in the 20th century and even in the first decade of the 21st century. The author presumes that independent bookstores became cultural ghettos and intellectual reservations, when net bookstores became successful actors of the mass culture. In general, it is predicted that heterogeneous, regionally localised minority book cultures and reading strategies of the New Medievalism may replace the “mass” book as a cultural institution of a modern political imagined communities as elements of the dying Gutenberg Galaxy with its heterogeneous national identities.

The Age of Questions: Or, a First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions Over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond, by Holly Case, 2018.

Holly Case’s most adventurous work as of yet seeks to juxtapose patterns common to nineteenth century publicists’ questions in order to reveal the contradictions of the age. Case devotes each chapter to a particular theme or ideological quality of the querists, which are in dispute with one another, and yet feature common idioms of progress and geopolitical reconfiguration. Internal to each chapter are the oxymoronic imbrications between conceptual polarities such as nationalism and the international public sphere, war through peace, gravitas with farce, and more. Case explains the prevalence of high-stakes public policy, prospects of war and the convulsive realignment of empires and nations through the persistent bundling of many of these questions. She addresses the ebb and flow of popularity of many era-spanning questions, which strengthens her attempt to provide a genealogy for the crises and ‘questions’ of our current era, and her accounting for how queristic contradictions were perceived to be transcended. It is reasonable to suggest that Case has provided a foundational step for an emergent niche of epistemological inquiry in the historical discipline, not unlike Benedict Anderson’s contribution to the study of nationalism through his magnum opus Imagined Communities.

Pieces of the puzzle: Stories from EFL Thai university students' language learning motivation, experiences, and self-identities in their imagined communities

<p>Despite the growth of English, the lingua franca of today’s world, most Thai undergraduates struggle to attain a high level of communicative skills in environments where English is a Foreign Language (EFL). This thesis explores and reinterprets Thai students’ language learning motivation, experiences, and their identity formation and development. The person-in-context relational view of motivation was used to complement Dörnyei’s theory of L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS). These frameworks were used to analyse the multifaceted aspects of individual and contextual influences on the participants’ L2 self and identity. This study employs a research methodology with a focus on a narrative qualitative approach. Quantitative data were collected from 356 first-year students at a public and private university in Thailand and four Thai students were purposively selected. These four participants were formally interviewed three to four times about their English learning motivation and experiences. The narrative data were generated by a series of individual interviews and supplemented by stimulated recall interviews, an English diary, and other person-family-and-social artefacts. Their L2 learning motivation and experiences from school to university were presented as unique individual narratives. The interview transcripts were then analysed across the cases to create themes. The findings indicated that the rote-memorisation, grammar-translation, and examination-orientated methods practised by their secondary and tertiary EFL teachers impacted the participants’ language learning motivation and the development of their L2 self-identities. The Thai participants prioritised speaking skills and felt highly motivated to attain communicative English for their future career. Their ideal L2 self appeared to be strengthened by their sustained efforts to communicate in English in both formal and informal learning contexts. Nonetheless, their ideal L2 self and ought-to L2 self seemed to be interconnected and worked together in their motivational system. The participants regulated themselves by using motivational strategies in association with the promotion-focused and prevention-focused instrumentality to maximise their intended effort in learning English. The inclusion of self-efficacy into the L2MSS model yields insights into how the participants actualised their self system in their motivational orientation. They pushed themselves to gain more exposure to a variety of learning experiences in both face-to-face and virtual communication in their imagined communities. By investing their effort and time in majoring in English and Business English, they envisioned themselves after graduation improving their parents’ and extended family’s social status and well-being. Their ideal L2 self and transportable identities were developed to meet Thailand’s integration within the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). For instance, two participants at a public university were able to envision themselves studying English at a Malaysian university. Narrative approaches shed light on the participants’ individual motivational orientations and the effects of these on the formation and development of their L2 self and identity in the past, present, and future. This study allows teachers and educators to understand the interplay between in-class and out-of-class learning experiences and the implication of the local, social, and global learning experiences of EFL Thai learners that may have been unexplored and unheard.</p>

Pieces of the puzzle: Stories from EFL Thai university students' language learning motivation, experiences, and self-identities in their imagined communities

<p>Despite the growth of English, the lingua franca of today’s world, most Thai undergraduates struggle to attain a high level of communicative skills in environments where English is a Foreign Language (EFL). This thesis explores and reinterprets Thai students’ language learning motivation, experiences, and their identity formation and development. The person-in-context relational view of motivation was used to complement Dörnyei’s theory of L2 Motivational Self System (L2MSS). These frameworks were used to analyse the multifaceted aspects of individual and contextual influences on the participants’ L2 self and identity. This study employs a research methodology with a focus on a narrative qualitative approach. Quantitative data were collected from 356 first-year students at a public and private university in Thailand and four Thai students were purposively selected. These four participants were formally interviewed three to four times about their English learning motivation and experiences. The narrative data were generated by a series of individual interviews and supplemented by stimulated recall interviews, an English diary, and other person-family-and-social artefacts. Their L2 learning motivation and experiences from school to university were presented as unique individual narratives. The interview transcripts were then analysed across the cases to create themes. The findings indicated that the rote-memorisation, grammar-translation, and examination-orientated methods practised by their secondary and tertiary EFL teachers impacted the participants’ language learning motivation and the development of their L2 self-identities. The Thai participants prioritised speaking skills and felt highly motivated to attain communicative English for their future career. Their ideal L2 self appeared to be strengthened by their sustained efforts to communicate in English in both formal and informal learning contexts. Nonetheless, their ideal L2 self and ought-to L2 self seemed to be interconnected and worked together in their motivational system. The participants regulated themselves by using motivational strategies in association with the promotion-focused and prevention-focused instrumentality to maximise their intended effort in learning English. The inclusion of self-efficacy into the L2MSS model yields insights into how the participants actualised their self system in their motivational orientation. They pushed themselves to gain more exposure to a variety of learning experiences in both face-to-face and virtual communication in their imagined communities. By investing their effort and time in majoring in English and Business English, they envisioned themselves after graduation improving their parents’ and extended family’s social status and well-being. Their ideal L2 self and transportable identities were developed to meet Thailand’s integration within the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC). For instance, two participants at a public university were able to envision themselves studying English at a Malaysian university. Narrative approaches shed light on the participants’ individual motivational orientations and the effects of these on the formation and development of their L2 self and identity in the past, present, and future. This study allows teachers and educators to understand the interplay between in-class and out-of-class learning experiences and the implication of the local, social, and global learning experiences of EFL Thai learners that may have been unexplored and unheard.</p>

Imagined Communities and Identities in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) Learning: A Literature Review

Imagined community and identity have been recognized as critical aspects in English language learning. Imagined community refers to the ideal community that learners wish to get engaged in, while imagined identity refers to the ideal self that language learners wish to become in the future. However, there is a scant research on these two notions in relation to English as a foreign language (EFL) learning. To that end, this paper aims to present the literature review of the contemporary theories on imagined communities and identities in EFL learning. It first discusses the imagined communities regarding the functions, community of practice, notions of imagined communities and concepts of imagined EFL classroom communities. It then scrutinizes imagined identities in terms of poststructuralists’ theory, English language learners’ identities, notion of imagined identity and EFL learners’ imagined identity. This paper is hoped to provide a timely and needed conceptual framework for other relevant constructs (e.g., English language learning investment) in English language learning.

The Duality of Arab Israeli Identity and the Politics of Survival in Sayed Kashua’s Let it Be Morning

This essay closely reads the Arab Israeli author Sayed Kashua’s Let It Be Morning to construe the complex survival trajectories of the Arab minority in Israel’s plural society. Kashua discusses the relentless struggles of Arab Israelis, caught in-between their social identification with Israeli citizenship and Palestinian nationalism. The novel captures the subjective and collective consequences of Israel’s ethnic democracy on the Arab community and demonstrates the social patterns in which Arab Israelis perceive, experience, and respond to systematic social segregation. This essay, through its interpretation of Arab Israeli experiences, manifested in the novel explores the conflict of contested minority identities through the Saidian discourse of orientalism and Anderson’s imagined communities. The nature of intra-communal rivalry among the minority groups for survival is also of interest to this study as the narrative locates the behavioural changes observed within the Arab community due to the negative environmental circumstances. The study also posits the sociological aspects of reinforcement theories to construe human behaviour in politically challenging environments.