Transitivity Analysis of Joe Biden’s Inaugural Address From the Perspective of Systemic Functional Grammar

Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar provides a new perspective and method for political discourse analysis. This paper first introduces the research status of political discourse at home and abroad, and then elaborates three metafunctions of Systemic Functional Grammar, namely ideational function, interpersonal function as well as textual function. On this basis, this paper makes an in-depth transitivity analysis of the inaugural address of the 46th president of the United States, Joseph Robinette Biden. Through profound research, this paper attempts to reveal how English language is applied to hide ideology in political speeches and how president Joe Biden uses various language features to persuade and inspire American people in order to reach his political purpose; at the same time, it also verifies the practicability of Systemic Functional Grammar in the analysis of political speech discourse.

The Arts and Social Change

This chapter analyzes the relation of the arts, and particularly music education, to social change. The first section discusses what social change is, presenting important research and ideas. It situates the notion of social change within the framework of utopia and connects it with human flourishing as its ultimate goal. The second section is concerned with the social impact of the arts, discussing important notions such as their relation to cultivation and to moral intentions, and their political purpose. The third section is explicitly focused on music education’s relation to social change, presenting general considerations and examples such as El Sistema or developments in international music education policy.

Applying Elastic-net Regression to Identify the Best Models Predicting Changes in Civic Purpose during the Emerging Adulthood

Introduction: Changes in civic purpose during the emerging adulthood has been a significant research topic since it is closely associated with active civic engagement later in human lives. While standard regression methods have been used in previous studies to predict civic purpose development, they have limitations that may not always lead to best prediction models. We aimed to address these limitations by utilizing elastic-net multinomial logistic regression, which favors models with the least number of necessary predictors, in exploration of predictors for civic purpose development in a data-driven manner. Methods: We analyzed data from the longitudinal Civic Purpose Project while focusing on the model that best predicted civic purpose from Wave 1 (before high school graduation) to Wave 2 (two years after Wave 1). The reanalyzed data included responses from 480 participants recruited Californian high schools. The elastic-net regression was performed 5,000 times for predicting three dependent variables, Wave 2 political purpose, community service purpose, and expressive activity purpose, with Wave 1 predictors. We identified which predictors were selected as the constituents of the best regression models during the elastic-net regression process.Results: Results showed that civic purpose, moral and political identity, and external supports (e.g., parental and peer involvement, school civic opportunities, etc.) in Wave 1 significantly predicted civic purpose in Wave 2. Several predictors were excluded from the regression models during the elastic-net regression process.Conclusion: We found that the elastic-net regression was able to present the more regularized model for prediction. Implications for promoting civic purpose are discussed as well as utilizing the elastic-net regression method.

Walking the Line: Borderlands and the Politics of Hiking

This article takes the Arizona Trail (AZT) as a case study to consider the ways that hiking is made to serve a political purpose in part through its representation as apolitical. I show how certain opposition to border wall construction employs the figure of the hiker as one that is both beyond the realm of politics and aligned with practices of good citizenship. This move then entails the production of that figure’s other, the migrant whose criminalized walking the wall is meant to prevent. In leaving that other largely unmarked and unaddressed, opposition to the wall’s construction can claim to be disengaged from politics while tacitly affirming the necessity of borders and their enforcement.

Clausewitz, Die Politik, and the Political Purpose of Strategy

Clausewitz’s writings stand in two traditions. On the one hand, with his own very narrow definition of strategy, “Strategy is the use of the [military] engagement for the purpose of the war,” he continued a tradition that goes back to Paul-Gédéon Joly de Maizeroy and beyond him to Byzantine Emperor Leo VI. It is not least because of Clausewitz’s espousal of this tradition that this narrow definition still dominated Soviet thinking. On the other hand, Clausewitz stood in a new tradition reflecting on the relationship between a political purpose of the war itself. This goes back to Guibert, Kant, Rühle von Lilienstern but also a long-forgotten anonymous work probably written by Zanthier. This dwelt on the bureaucratic process of strategy-making in the interface between (politically dominated) foreign policy and (hardware- and means-dominated) military policy. It is ultimately to the latter tradition that we owe his reflections on the domination of political considerations captured in his famous line about war being the continuation of politics by other means. This in turn is the foundation on which most other reflections on grand strategy have been built.

Application of Deep Learning for Level of Engagement in Civic Activities Prediction in Emerging Adulthood for Smart City Development

We applied the deep learning method, which has been developed in the fields of computer and data science for accurate prediction, to predict political purpose development during emerging adulthood. We tested whether deep learning more accurately predicted Wave 2 political purpose with Wave 1 predictors compared with traditional regression. A convolutional neural network consisting of two dense and dropout layers was trained to predict the outcome variable. For comparison, we also estimated a multinomial logistic regression model. The result demonstrated that deep learning outperformed traditional regression in general while effectively minimizing overfitting. Moreover, from exploratory analysis, we found that deep learning might be able to model the non-linear relationship between the predictors and outcome variable. Based on the findings, we discussed the implications of the present study within the context of improving citizens’ lives in smart cities.

The Temporality of Identity in Planned Cities: A Case Study of Zhong Xing New Village, Taiwan

In 1957, the Kuomintang (KMT), Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalist government, planned and built Zhong Xing New Village (ZXNV), a garden city, to house the Taiwan Provincial Government. Despite the benefits of public housing, healthcare, and education, ZXNV experienced a two-third drop in population after 1985. The political liberalization and democratization of Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s led to the reclamation of Taiwanese national identity that rejected the hegemony of the KMT and the physical manifestations of this colonial history, including ZXNV. ZXNV was a utopian ideal constructed during a time of authoritarian rule for a specific political purpose and homogenous population. ZXNV’s inability to change its purpose and identity led to its ultimate depopulation. Ethnographic fieldwork reveals the changes in ZXNV’s built environment and neighborhood culture influenced by socio-political transformations over the last sixty years. Fourteen interviews were conducted with two generations of ZXNV residents, and archival research reveals the intended design and policies of the city. Key findings include the structural flaws in the city’s design, the exposure of political tensions between the national and provincial governments, and the changing national identity of Taiwan due to globalization, all of which led to the ultimate downfall of Zhong Xing New Village.

Towards Smarter and Fairer Justice? A Review of the Chinese Scholarship on Building Smart Courts and Automating Justice

This article reviews how Chinese scholars debate the policy of building smart courts in the context of judicial reform. This policy entails the automation and digitisation of judicial processes. It is part of broader judicial reforms that aim to create a more accurate and consistent judiciary. The article identifies four reform concepts that guide the debate: efficiency, consistency, transparency and supervision, and judicial fairness. This review is a meta-synthesis, using practices of narrative and systematic literature reviews, focusing on evaluating and interpreting the Chinese scholarship and reform concepts. It reviews how Chinese scholars discuss the implications of judicial automation and digitisation. Additionally, it analyses the normative concepts behind the reform goals within China’s political-legal context. The analysis finds that the generally positive evaluation in the debate can be explained by an instrumentalist understanding of the reform concepts and the political purpose of courts in the Chinese political-legal context.

Paulo Freirean Ideas at the Grassroots: From Problem Posing Education to Critical Consciousness

This article aims to reflectively analyse the personal and organisational trajectory of a grassroots activist—researcher in translating abstract praxis-related theoretical ideas to practise through a two-way process of learning. It critically discuses an evolving process of collective actions and associated reflections that progressively brought clarity on the theoretical aspects of the Freirean concepts. The process of the application and usefulness of the problem posing education, conscientisation and critical consciousness in transforming the lives of women and communities is reflectively narrated. The author argues that Freire’s transformative conceptualisations not only have the impact on the ‘oppressed’, but also on the ‘privileged’ who chose to work with them. Despite some limitations, the author, as a community practitioner/activist, finds Freire’s ideas as a gift in the political purpose and politics of her work. These reflections will be of use to community practitioners and members working in similar contexts.