Models of rhetorical relations in Russian blogging as an indicator of interlocutors’ information behavior

Russian blog texts are characterized by the fact that the respondent expresses opinions in order to convince the author of the effectiveness of certain ideas that cover his/her private life and professional activities. The respondent presents arguments in favor of his/her opinion, introduces the rationale for it, and at the same time indicates that the point of view previously expressed by the blogger is also relevant in the contextual situation under discussion. Rhetorical relations project conflict-free development of easy communication. As a result, the points of view put forward by the blogger and the respondent complement each other. It turns out that the same situation potentially generates both positive and negative emotions, and this is emphasized in the virtual communication based on the implementation of the phatic function of language. Rhetorical relations within the blog text help to combine different epistemic positions expressed by the interlocutors. In this regard, an urgent problem of linguistic research of Russian blog texts is to determine whether the interlocutors who exchange opinions and assessments form integral models of dialogic communication, based on which means of linking the stimulating and reacting messages are connected. This problem has not yet received proper empirical analysis in Russian studies and general language theory, although its solution, as we believe, contains significant implications for detailing the pragmatic specifics of blog communication. The aim of the study is to implement a structural and pragmatic analysis of rhetorical relations in blog texts, which involves identifying the dominant markers of these relations, their basic model and its variants. The goal stated in the article is realized through the following research methods: (1) the method of observation and interpretation of blogging while analyzing the peculiarities of the linguistic means of implementing connectivity; (2) descriptive-analytical (contextual) method-direct analysis of blog text fragments as a linear sequence; (3) a method for modeling rhetorical cause-and-effect relationships between segments of a single replica and at the level of integral dialogic unity in the blog text. It is concluded that rhetorical relations fix national and cultural stereotypes, which, in turn, determine the material and ideal scope of the degree of relevance of the addressees evaluation activity. When implementing such speech actions, the interlocutors take into rigid consideration not only the frequent and dominant cultural scripts of dialogic axiological performance, but also the relevant stereotypes of such activities that are set by the language system. The rhetorical relations between stimulating and reacting messages in the context of computer-mediated communication generate facilitate the processes of decoding the informative and emotional content of the jointly generated text and its implications.

Everything Seems So Illogical: Constructing Missingness Between Life and Death in Israel

This paper discusses the case of missing persons in Israel, to show how the category of “missingness” is constructed by the people who have been left behind, and how this may threaten the life-death dichotomy assumption. The field of missing persons in Israel is characterized not only by high uncertainty, but also by the absence of relevant cultural scripts. Based on a narrative ethnography of missingness in Israel, I claim that a new and subversive social category of “missingness” can be constructed following the absence of cultural scripts. The left-behinds fluctuate not only between different assumptions about the missing person’s fate; they also fluctuate between acceptance of the life-death dichotomy, thus yearning for a solution to a temporary in-between state, and blurring this dichotomy, and thus constructing “missingness” as a new stable and subversive ontological category. Under this category, new rites of passage are also negotiated and constructed.

Toward a Just Leadership Learning Ecology: A CHAT-IT Analysis of the Highlander Idea

Purpose: This paper conceptualizes a just leadership learning ecology through an analysis of one nontraditional site of leadership preparation: the Highlander Research and Education Center (originally founded as the Highlander Folk School). Methodology: Drawing on cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) and institutional theory (IT), we examine the core design and pedagogy of Highlander, which co-founder, Myles Horton, referred to as the “Highlander idea.” Findings: We illustrate how a residential learning and living environment, norms of epistemic humility and democratic decision making, and horizontal teaching and learning roles fostered social justice leadership. This just leadership learning ecology reflected institutions present at the time of Highlander's founding, including cultural scripts rooted in prophetic Christianity, class consciousness, and unfolding social movements in Appalachia and the South. Implications: Our analysis of Highlander extends recent efforts to re-envision the how and who of leadership preparation and addresses the observed lack of coherence within this subfield.

Mothering Practices in Cambodia

The physical disciplining of children is widespread globally. To work towards ending physical disciplining, we need to understand this practice’s local and contextual justifications. In this article, we explore Cambodian mothers’ rationale for the physical disciplining of their children, as we seek to address two questions: 1) How do Cambodian mothers perceive physical discipline?, and 2) How do they negotiate and justify physical disciplining practices? Based on 10 group interviews with mothers of small children, and in different communities in Cambodia, we found that the physical disciplining is a common practice used to correct behaviours considered unhelpful, impolite or disrespectful. However, there are ambivalent attitudes toward this. This suggests that physical discipline is not a static practice, but rather one that is constantly negotiated. We argue that Barbara Rogoff’s concept of cultural scripts for parenting is well suited for making sense of how physical discipline is justified among Cambodian mothers.

Transporting Problem Based Learning to the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries (GCC): Using Cultural Scripts to Analyze Cultural Complexities

The globalization of education has increased large-scale education reforms worldwide. Over the past 15 years, Gulf Cooperation Council Countries (GCC) have invested significant resources in reforming their education systems. This has led to extensive borrowing of pedagogical approaches to initiate and implement educational change. This article evokes several cultural learning scripts to identify the challenges that arise when pedagogical approaches are adopted and implemented. Specifically, problem-based learning (PBL) is examined against the backdrop of these cultural scripts to examine the cultural complexities of PBL in a GCC context. Discussion is provided that addresses several fundamental concerns that should be considered in order to reduce the cultural challenges and improve the implementation of PBL in GCC contexts. trends towards collaborative tools, while also describing opportunities and challenges with digital literacy. Finally, teachers described strategic approaches to assessment in light of the ill-structured problems posed by PBL. Implications for practice and theory are discussed.

Introduction: From Conceptual Debates to Practical Applications

Bringing into focus the ways of how to approach trauma instead of defining the object of research is becoming increasingly important. This also indicates that the range of approaches to trauma that informs cultural inquiry is widening, and is moving away from one singular paradigm posited as universal. Trauma scholars have demonstrated, on the one hand, the importance of particular experiences, specific cases, individual features of experiencing, remembering, and narrating trauma. On the other hand, they have pointed out the impact of cultural “scripts” shaped by broader cultural understandings and social and cultural regulations and preferences that shape the possibilities of the representation of traumatic experience. This special issue seeks to recognize and negotiate the individual and collective dimensions of trauma as well as their interwovenness, with a focus on the (post)-Soviet and Eastern European experience. It does so by addressing the generalizing theoretical models as well as the practical, material, and experimental aspects of trauma. Thus, it seeks to disentangle and clarify the links between the collective and the individual, the theoretical and the practical, and finally, the universal and the specific, the global and the local.

From hooking up to staying in? Women negotiating appropriate sexuality in nightlife with age

While much research has explored contemporary constructions of young women’s sexuality, few studies have been sensitive to how age influences women’s sexuality in the context of mainstream nightlife. Drawing on sexual scripting theory, I investigate how 19 Norwegian women (ages 27–34 years) draw on and negotiate cultural scripts when making sense of their nightlife experiences with age. I found that nightlife was an increasingly difficult space to occupy, and that participating could cause tension with the women’s understandings of themselves, their behaviours and their desires in nightlife. While age-related scripts allowed the participants to criticise gender inequality in sexual interaction in nightlife, they simultaneously obscured how gender inequality in nightlife persisted in new forms with age.

Framed by the Law: Experimental Evidence for the Effects of the Salience of the Law on Preferences

This Article takes an experimental approach to test whether the salience of the law as a system that governs an interaction affects people’s preferences. I find that when the law is made salient in an interaction people’s preferences are altered: they express more future-oriented preferences and donate less money to charity, as compared to when the law is not salient in an otherwise identical interaction. When the law is salient in an interaction people also prefer ‘products’ over experiences, but this gap is only marginally significant. The findings suggest that the framing of an interaction as legal tends to evoke cultural scripts and implicit rules of behavior (“common knowledge”) that incorporate the shared assumptions in society about the law. In response, participants interpret the interaction as more rational and instrumental and express preferences accordingly.

Civility and Rejection: The Contextuality of Cosmopolitan and Racist Behaviours

Applying a dual-process framework to in-depth interviews and survey data, this article explores behavioural manifestations of intercultural attitudes for white majority Norwegians. The article builds upon established literatures on social cognition showing that humans operate with two separate cognitive systems. Affective ‘automatic’ heuristics often generate negative stereotypes, aversive emotions and behavioural responses to ethnic diversities. In contrast, the ‘discursive’ cognitive system, which stores cultural scripts, motivates predominantly egalitarian aspirations and performances. As people balance their behaviours according to contextual evaluations of costs and benefits, the article’s findings indicate a tendency to practise openness and civility in public and spatio-temporally bounded encounters, and to reject or exclude the Other in half or more of privately made selection decisions.

Queering Ageism

Queer theory is an effective tool for challenging ageist assumptions concerning the life course. Recent approaches by age studies scholars and queer theorists, such as Barbara Marshall, Linn Sandberg, Elizabeth Freeman, and Dustin B. Goltz, make use of a queer-theoretical lens to expose naturalized essentialist views of old age and the life course as normative constructions. As a significant way to heighten and shape cultural visibility, literary and filmic narratives play a crucial role in queering ageist cultural scripts of growing older and in highlighting the importance of non-heteronormative representations of aging. Leonora Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet (1974) and Bruce LaBruce’s film Gerontophilia (2013) both exemplify, in their own ways, this process of queering as one of questioning, dismantling, and transforming essentialist assumptions about aging.