Transcending gender dichotomy through art teacher education in Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is a patriarchal society characterized by gender dichotomy and male domination that permeates through social, educational and domestic spheres resulting in numerous challenges for art teacher education students. Expanding critical consciousness within art teacher education programmes is an imperative step towards developing art teachers who are self-aware and reflexive concerning the intersections of gender, art and education. This study investigated how engagement with visual art can provoke a heightened critical awareness about gender bias, stereotyping and equity among Zimbabwean art teacher education students. Sixteen selected art teacher education students (eight males and females) at the Great Zimbabwe University participated in the study. Participants were guided by researcher-constructed prompts for purposes of image making, interpretation and dialogue. Visual discourse analysis of the students’ visual narratives and discourse analysis of focus group transcriptions revealed several themes as well as evidence of critical reflection and expanded critical awareness related to gender issues. Visual and dialogic methods offer promise for critical engagement and reconciliation of tensions surrounding issues of gender amongst art teacher education candidates.

Valuing the local within the global: A discourse analysis of professional development in a U.S.-Kurdish transnational university partnership

In an effort to support higher education in developing countries, partnerships between U.S. and international universities have surged, raising questions concerning the social equity of such linkages. Using a New Literacy Studies approach to discourse analysis, online transcripts from one such university partnership were analyzed to determine how language was used to negotiate a more equitable partnership through the adaptation of the social context of professional development activities. Discourse analysis of three relevant linguistic markers in the data suggests that cultural perspectives on professional development influenced the language choices made by university partners, reshaping the power structure toward greater social equity, and aiding in the completion of joint professional development goals. Findings underscore the importance of drawing on local knowledges in planning for and conducting transnational university partnerships.

Deixis in English Islamic Friday sermons: A pragma-discourse analysis

Although deixis has received increasingly academic attention in linguistic research, its use in sermons, particularly in the Islamic context, has been largely underexplored. Therefore, this paper examined deixis in Islamic Friday sermons from the perspective of pragmatics and discourse analysis. Drawing on Levinson’s Framework, it aimed at analyzing three main types of deixis (personal, temporal, and spatial), focusing on their forms, features, functions, and frequency. The data were a corpus of 70 sermons compiled by the researcher from various online websites. The study employed qualitative and quantitative methods to meet the purpose of the study. The findings revealed that these three deictic types were relatively common in the language of the respective corpus with the personal type being predominant, deictically pointing to different referents whose interpretation was sensitive to the context in which they occurred. As an affectively powerful tool in the corpus, the preachers utilized deixis to serve a wide variety of functions on the discourse and pragmatic levels. In the corpus, deictic expressions worked as a discourse strategy to persuade the listeners by drawing their attention and engaging them in the message of the sermon and to signal and organize the flow of information in the ongoing discourse. They also served to enhance togetherness, intimacy, and politeness between the preachers and their audience. This study is hoped to present a good basis for further linguistic investigation of deixis in other languages and religions to illuminate how deictics work in sermonic discourse.

A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of “Lathi” Song

Music has a personal interest in its individual. It can deliver happiness for those who listen to it. On the other hand, the music should correlate with its pictures through the video clip, such as color, sound, gesture, etc. This article attempts to investigate and explore the interpersonal meaning of the LATHI Song. This study was conducted qualitatively using a descriptive-analytical study to check how different semiotic and modes such as music, sound, speech, color, action, and facial expression work together to build the interpersonal meaning. LATHI song is successful in attracting audiences' attention around the world. The song's lyrics are mainly in English, except for the bridge sung in Javanese. Not only that, but the bridge also employs pelog, a Javanese seven-note scale used in gamelan arrangements. In addition, its instruments played has a unique characteristic and easy listening.

Majoritarian Stories and Counterstories: Critical Race Theory Approaches to Countering Deficit Discourse in Higher Education

This paper employs critical discourse analysis to interrogate rhetorics of academic deficit subtending institutional neglect of equitable opportunity for students of color at U.S. postsecondary institutions. It further reviews Critical Race Theory literature in education, paying special attention to research that foregrounds social class as a discriminate variable distinguishing truly liberatory pedagogies from the merely critical.

Beyond facts – a survey and conceptualisation of claims in online discourse analysis

Analyzing statements of facts and claims in online discourse is subject of a multitude of research areas. Methods from natural language processing and computational linguistics help investigate issues such as the spread of biased narratives and falsehoods on the Web. Related tasks include fact-checking, stance detection and argumentation mining. Knowledge-based approaches, in particular works in knowledge base construction and augmentation, are concerned with mining, verifying and representing factual knowledge. While all these fields are concerned with strongly related notions, such as claims, facts and evidence, terminology and conceptualisations used across and within communities vary heavily, making it hard to assess commonalities and relations of related works and how research in one field may contribute to address problems in another. We survey the state-of-the-art from a range of fields in this interdisciplinary area across a range of research tasks. We assess varying definitions and propose a conceptual model – Open Claims – for claims and related notions that takes into consideration their inherent complexity, distinguishing between their meaning, linguistic representation and context. We also introduce an implementation of this model by using established vocabularies and discuss applications across various tasks related to online discourse analysis.

ISIL in Iraq: A Critical Analysis of the UN Security Council’s Gendered Personification of (Non)States

Legal feminist theories have troubled dominant conceptions of statehood, revealing the threat of the ‘Other’ as integral to the hegemonic masculinity of powerful states. In this paper I provide a critical gendered discourse analysis of the UN Security Council’s response to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIL). I consider the role of personification in constituting legal subjects as states (persons) and excavate this from the Council’s resolutions concerning Iraq. In constituting ISIL as a barbaric, hypermasculine terror group in relational opposition to the state of Iraq, the Council draws on gendered normativities ordinarily veiled by seemingly objective legal criteria as to the creation of states. Whilst the state of Iraq is constituted through the hegemonic model of statehood, one premised upon democratic, liberal Westphalian ideals, it is still subject to the paternalism of the Security Council. In this way, the state of Iraq is framed as failing to reach a particular masculine standard of statehood, and is thus subject to the continuation of ‘civilising’ discourses. Thus, instead of asking whether ISIL is or is not a state under international law, it is revealing to consider how responses to it work to maintain and (re)produce a graded, hierarchical international community of states.