“Disciplining” Educational Research in the Twentieth Century

Educational research expanded rapidly in the twentieth century. This expansion drove the interested “amateurs” out of the field; the scientific community of peers became the dominant point of orientation. Authorship and authority became more widely distributed; peer review was institutionalized to monitor the flow of ideas within the scientific literature; reference lists in journals demonstrated the adoption of cumulative ideals about science. The historical analysis of education journals presented in this chapter looks at the social changes which contributed to the ascent of an “imagined” community of expert peers in the course of the twentieth century. This analysis also helps us in imagining ways in which improvements to the present academic evaluative culture can be made.

Reading with David Jones

Chapter 1 represents a major archival reassessment of Jones’s knowledge of and interest in early medieval culture and history produced in England, demonstrating that Jones knew many Old English texts in the original language and was engaged with the historiography of the period. The chapter sets out the findings of new archival research with The Library of David Jones, National Library of Wales, and in particular with The Anglo-Saxon Library (Appendix 1). This archival research facilitates a new methodology for reading with Jones and brings evidence from his reading, including previously uncatalogued marginalia, together with the drafts and manuscripts for The Anathemata. This chapter also places Jones’s innovation within the wider context of his reading of historical scholarship on the early Middle Ages, tracing the development of a scholarly poetics with which Jones reshaped a British historical and cultural inheritance for the imagined community of The Anathemata.

The Desire to See and Be Seen

Chapter 1 interrogates Bruce LaBruce’s, Todd Haynes’s, and John Greyson’s respective approaches to community and belonging in the midst of the pandemic. By turning to the biopic genre, these filmmakers sought to challenge how dominant culture sees and represents pathologized bodies. Queer filmmakers’ use of the biopic draws on the genre’s history of creating an imagined community, national and otherwise, to represent alternative social relations constructed in the image of different (queer) individuals. Moreover, the chapter gives sustained consideration to films like Zero Patience (Greyson, 1993) to explore constructions of queer (or gay and lesbian) community—who they include, who they exclude, what they produce, and how they affect queer embodiment.

Silva Theutonica. Las jako mitologem niemieckiej odrębności

Since the fifteenth century, when Tacitus’ Germania was discovered, the Teutonic Forest has been the central mythologeme of the German imagined community created by successive generations of philosophers, theologians and artists. The interest in multiple relationships between the prototype native landscape of the forest and the Germanic national character grew throughout the nineteenth century, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the interwar period, up to the times of Nazism.

Enemy Imaginaries: A Case Study of the Far Right in Canada

Background: Social media and digital technology play a central role in amplifying the potential harms of the far right. Analysis: The concept of enemy imaginaries is developed to map the digital and social media practices of far-right actors and groups in their antagonistic participation with and against a liberal, multicultural, globalist imagined community. Analysis focuses on a dramatic clash at a People’s Party of Canada event in Hamilton, Ontario, during the 2019 federal election. Conclusion and implications: Disparate far-right groups can momentarily crystallize around a particular event to define new nationalist objects that are symbolic of their networked and mediated fight against an imagined enemy. Contexte : Les réseaux sociaux et les technologies numériques sont des sources d’amplification des risques posés par l’extrême droite. Analyse : Nous développons le concept d’imaginaires ennemis pour identifier les pratiques en ligne et en réseau social des acteurs et groupes d’extrême droite, en particulier leur engagement antagoniste envers une communauté imaginaire libérale, multiculturelle et mondialisée. Nous concentrons notre analyse sur un affrontement dramatique lors d’une rencontre organisée par le Parti populaire du Canada à Hamilton, Ontario, lors de l’élection fédérale de 2019. Conclusion et implications : Les mouvements disparates d’extrême droite peuvent s’agglomérer momentanément autour d’un événement particulier pour définir de nouveaux objets nationalistes qui symbolisent leur lutte dans les réseaux sociaux et les médias contre un ennemi imaginé.

Politics and Sport don’t mix – or do they? National Identity and New Zealand’s Participation in the Olympic Games

<p>Sports matter. Today sport is one of the most enduring social events that humans from across the world participate in, no matter their race, religion or gender. Moreover, the biggest of all those sporting events is the Olympic Games, which is held every four years. The modern version of the Games was founded by Frenchman Baron Pierre de Coubertin and first took place in Athens in 1896. New Zealand first competed alongside Australia as Australasia in London 1908 and Stockholm 1912. Following the games of 1916 which were cancelled due to World War I, New Zealand has competed as a sovereign nation since Antwerp 1920. Since 1908, over 1200 New Zealanders have competed at the Olympic Games, winning more than 100 medals. That performance in itself makes New Zealand one of the most successful nations in Olympic history on a per capita basis. That statistic alone underscores the relationship between the Olympics and national identity, as an embodiment of New Zealanders believing they ‘punch above their weight’ on the world stage. Benedict Anderson wrote about the imagined community, where the nation is imagined because it is impossible for every citizen to know each other.¹ This research has found that sporting teams like the All Blacks and the New Zealand Olympic Team are perfect avenues to help create this imagined community. New Zealand’s national identity is not fixed, it has evolved, but the one mainstay of that identity is the sense of being an underdog on the world stage. The research has found that over the past three decades New Zealand governments have increasingly woken up to the importance of high-performance sport and following the disappointment of the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, funding was increased, which has led to better results and more medals. Today New Zealand athletes are funded on a per-capita basis just as well as many other nations we would compare ourselves with. New Zealand politicians have been quick to associate themselves alongside sportsmen and women and often speak about the close link that exists between sport and identity in New Zealand. However, unlike Australia, New Zealand does not have a national sports museum, and also unlike Australia, and the United Kingdom, New Zealand legislation does not allow for free-to-air television coverage of games of national significance. New Zealand does not adequately showcase its sporting history, and this has the potential to negatively affect the importance New Zealanders place on sport and the Olympic Movement as an important part of its national identity. Ultimately this research has found that the New Zealand Olympic Team epitomises what it means to be a New Zealander and has found that across multiple levels of analysis, the Olympic Movement has significantly contributed to the development of New Zealand’s national identity. More broadly, the Olympic Games have become a key avenue in which that national identity can be projected to the world. ¹ Benedict Anderson, ‘Imagined Communities,’ (London: Verso, 2006), pp.6-7.</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.

Mermaid Iconography and Early Modern Anglo-American Maritime Culture

This article builds upon recent research on early modern Anglo-American maritime culture to demonstrate how mariners used shared mermaid iconography (such as spaces, symbolism, objects, superstitions, and songs) to cultivate an ‘imagined community’ that linked their lives at sea to that on land, and vice versa. Ships and taverns were key to such efforts, as these public spheres – themselves branded by mermaid iconography – served as well-recognised nodes of maritime identity-ways. Ultimately, early modern Anglo-American sailors claimed mermaid iconography as critical symbols of maritime culture that transcended space and time, thereby helping diverse constituents of global empires to create connections wherever they travelled.

Quasi-Naturalism and the Problem of Alternative Normative Concepts

The following scenario seems possible: a community uses concepts that play the same role in guiding actions and shaping social life as our normative concepts, and yet refer to something else. As Eklund (2017) argues, this apparent possibility poses a problem for any normative realist who aspires to vindicate the thought that reality itself favors our ways of valuing and acting. How can realists make good on this idea, given that anything they might say in support of the privileged status of our normative concepts can be mirrored by the imagined community? E.g., the realist might claim that using our concepts is what we ought to do if we are to describe normative facts correctly, but members of the other community can claim the same about their concepts, using their own concept of ought. A promising approach to this challenge is to try to rule out the possibility of alternative normative concepts, by arguing that any concepts that have the same normative role must share a reference as well. (Eklund calls this referential normativity.) In this paper I argue that normative quasi-naturalism, a view that combines expressivism about normative discourse with a naturalist metaphysics of normativity, supports referential normativity and solves the problem of alternative normative concepts.