Student comments on a professor’s rating as an evaluating speech genre in Russian and American educational discourse

This article focuses on the speech genre “student comments on a professor’s rating” which belongs to the domain of quality assurance in higher education. Both aspects are meaningful for the theory of speech genres and the system of higher education. The article analyses the communicative concept “student feedback on teaching” which is related to the speech genre under research. The article also deals with description and comparative analysis of speech genre features of axiological texts which belong to the domain of the “quality of education” in Russian and American linguistic cultures. Apart from this, the article attempts to classify the speech genre forms of students comments on teaching. On the basis of the comparative analysis of the speech genre “student feedback on teaching” in Russian and American education discourse there have been deduced several common and national specific language features and phenomena. The evaluating communicative concept “student feedback on teaching” comprises not only emotional evaluating attitude of the author but also a structural semiotic paradigm of the teaching evaluation. The American concept demonstrates higher semiotic density. The comparative analysis of verbal implementation of the concept in the Russian and American student feedback comments allows to conclude that the corresponding speech genre in American culture looks like an established speech practice, while into Russian culture this genre has been borrowed and is still being formed.

UNDERSTANDING RUSSIAN SMART POWER: PERCEPTIONS AND IDEOLOGY

Russian foreign policy today incarnates the double-headed eagle of smart power perceptions and Neo-Eurasian ideology. The main purpose of this article is to examine the emergence and development of Russian smart power by analyzing the foreign policy concepts of the Russian Federation after September 11. In this paper, I will argue that Moscow’s smart strategy is much similar to the American concept of smart power, but only in terms of its purpose. The article’s assertion rests on the assumption that smart power allowed Washington to sustain its global dominance after the terrorist attacks from September 11, and alternately – could help Russia to consolidate Eurasia. The Coronavirus Pandemic, of course, will have long-term consequences for the international security. Finally, I will conclude that if Moscow wants to maintain the Russia-dominated security system in Eurasia, it should develop its original concept of smart power.

THE “CORDIAL MAN”: A LATIN AMERICAN CONCEPT IN THE BRAZILIAN ESSAY

This article analyzes Sérgio Buarque de Holanda’s Roots of Brazil (1936), a seminal book in the Brazilian essayist tradition. Discussion begins with the limits of Brazil’s search for national specificity, so as to consider Brazilian cultural formation as a projection of its colonial Iberian roots. In this context, the “cordial man” emerges as a metaphor for the lack of public space in Brazil. On the one hand, the cordial man is a product of turn-of-the-century debates on Latin American exceptionalism, a figure almost capable of withstanding the disillusions of the modern world. On the other hand, the cordial man offers Buarque de Holanda a window into the limits of democratic liberalism and the personalistic political traditions of Latin America: an impasse discussed at length but never resolved in Roots of Brazil. Ultimately, the book permits a deeper questioning of the collective pulses and individual desires that, together, form the matter to which populism would respond, a political form temporarily capable of meeting the people’s demands.

Reflecting back

This invitation presents an opportunity to bring together older and newer strands of work on relations. The first fell back on an analytical notion of aesthetics to convey certain kinds of persuasive appearances: Melanesian ethnography emphasized how much it mattered that relations took an appropriate form (recognizing the support of ancestors for example). The second is a recent critique of relations as an explicit Euro-American concept in one of its vernacular contexts, namely English usage. Here, the kinds of Amerindianist interests engaged by the special issue of this journal – and as gleaned from certain translations into English – lead me to locate an aesthetic effect in the penumbra of connotations and associations that endow relations (English-speaking) with an aura or mood. What anthropologists ordinarily dismiss when they construct their analytical vocabularies becomes interesting.

Transatlantic Exchanges

This chapter will treat transatlantic journalism as a product of multi-directional borrowing (even if not always symmetrical), within the context of a wider ‘Anglo-world’ that was marked by migrations and tours, as well as within a multi-media environment. Rather than an “Americanized” British press, what emerges is a shared journalistic culture that retains important pockets of difference. The chapter will begin by tracing the transatlantic emergence of a mass circulation press, and the bifurcation of journalistic styles along lines of status. Beginning with the emergence of Britain’s ‘new journalism’ in the 1880s, it will show that while certain popular forms (interviews, informal tone, brevity) made their way from the United States to London, others, such as crusades and the demotic voice, had significant British roots. Furthermore, transformations associated with the new journalism quickly made their way to Ireland, where they blended with nationalist politics. American elite political journalism in this era was often explicitly influenced by British models e.g. the New Republic (1914) and various suffrage periodicals. Conversely, British journalistic norms never embraced the American concept of ‘objectivity’, continuing deep into the twentieth century to emphasize an idea of ‘independence’ that was fully compatible with partisanship.

Media, place-making, and concept-metaphors: the US-Mexico border during the rise of Donald Trump

In this article, we trace shifting representations of a US-Mexico border region in national mainstream news media during the rise of Donald Trump. We argue that the border is an American concept-metaphor that circulates and reshapes in media in response to political actors. We compare articles published in 2015, 2016, and 2017 about the Texas borderlands where the majority of Central American asylum seekers arrived. Crucial to Trump’s success, the narrow, racialized rendering of the border inadvertently provoked a wider array of representations in national news media but remained rooted in how Americans think about Others, sovereignty, and immigration. Our work contributes to scholarship that connects discursive regimes and statecraft with life in borderlands to lay bare underlying social tensions and potential violence. Analysis of concept-metaphors can open spaces for new articulations of key cultural domains and interrogate hidden assumptions about places, crucial during times of surging populism and nationalism.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction

Chapter 8 unpacks the modern American concept of “mindfulness.” Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), developed by Jon Kabat-Zinn in 1979, provides a model for mindfulness-based programs (MBPs), such as Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT). MBSR is nominally “secular” and supported by scientific research, yet infused at every level—concept, structure, teaching training, and graduate resources—with systematic instruction in Buddhist-derived assumptions, values, and practices, what Kabat-Zinn interprets as the “essence” of Buddhism. Many MBPs exhibit the Malnak-Meyers indicia of religion. Certain mindfulness missionaries conceptualize their tactics as “skillful means,” “Stealth Buddhism,” “Trojan horse,” or “script.” Other proponents may understand mindfulness teachings as self-evidently true and “universal,” without recognizing that supposedly “secular ethics” are socially constructed and contested by others, including Christians and certain Buddhists. MBPs exemplify the difficulty of extracting the “secular” from the “religious.” Mindfulness is “secular” in privileging present experience and “religious” in comprising a world view and way of life premised on more-than-physical assumptions about the nature of reality, self, and the path to salvation from suffering. The chapter argues that secularization requires more than subtracting religious language and adding scientific framing: rebuilding from foundations uncontrolled by assumptions about the nature of the self and the world.

The First Continental Congress

Following overviews of revolutionary, moderate, loyalist, and shifting usages, chapter 7 introduces state of nature arguments during and around the First Continental Congress in order to reconstruct the process of contestation and consolidation that led to a relatively stable, and distinctly American concept of the state of nature by 1776. In a continuation of previous accounts of the dynamic of contesting and consolidating a shared American semantic range of the state of nature, this chapter describes several key moments when moderates and loyalists objected to invoking the state of nature for fear that doing so would make reconciliation with Britain improbable or impossible. Patriots at the Congress insisted on using the term, and the package of connotations and constitutional claims accumulated since 1761, for the same reason. The long-running controversy surrounding Galloway’s Plan, and the polemic between Samuel Seabury and Alexander Hamilton, are discussed as extensions of the same state-of-nature dynamic of the First Continental Congress.

The Old World Meets the New

This chapter stretches from the early eighteenth century to the end of the French and Indian War. With a focus on how European ideals permeated early American society, Chapter 1 traces Washington and Franklin’s individual definitions of honor and virtue and how they changed over time. It discusses how their mindsets were largely the result of self-education and personal experience, allowing for a comparison between the northern and southern colonies. It also illustrates the extremely early emergence of an American concept of honor, highlighted by Franklin’s 1723 original concept of merit-based “ascending honor”. The chapter shows Americans as first moving closer to Europe ideologically, before a transformation in ethical ideals saw a greater divergence from the mother country. It also frames the Revolution as being sparked by these preexisting ethical changes.